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Critical beauties: Aesthetics, gender, and realism in John Ruskin and George Eliot

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Critical beauties: Aesthetics, gender, and realism in John Ruskin and George Eliot

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Content CRITICAL BEAUTIES: AESTHETICS,
GENDER, AND REALISM IN JOHN RUSKIN AND GEORGE ELIOT
by
Elizabeth Marie Archer
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
December 2003
Copyright 2003 Elizabeth Marie Archer
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
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LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-1695
This dissertation, written by
f-u2.4toem\ M. A _____ ; __
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Table of Contents
Abstract................................................................................................................iii
Introduction............................................................................................................1
1 Reading Beauty: Woman as the Beautiful in “Of Queens’ Gardens”
and Adam Bede..................................................................................................... 7
2 Beautiful Judges/Ideal Critics: Reading Sympathy in Hume, Ruskin,
and Eliot...............................................................................................................72
3 Beauty Reading Herself: Woman as Ornament in Felix Holt....................114
4 Reading Dorothea: The Real v. the Good in Middlemarch........................168
5 “The Whole Being Consents”: The Aesthetics of Moral Choice in
Daniel Deronda.................................................................................................226
Bibliography..................................................................................................... 280
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Abstract
This dissertation engages the representation of Victorian heroines in
order to open up our contemporary critical understanding of the political
potential of aesthetic theory. The complex association between women and
the beautiful, often seen as disabling to both, was refigured by writers like
John Ruskin and George Eliot as a radical model for critiquing and
instigating social progress. Through an analysis of Ruskin’s “Of Queens’
Gardens” and Modem Painters, Eliot’s Adam Bede, Felix Holt,
Middlemarch. and Daniel Deronda. and David Hume’s “Of the Standard of
Taste,” I argue that these writers use this model to attack nineteenth-century
political economy by reworking its roots in an eighteenth-century
epistemology based upon the limited certainties of the empirical body. Both
the Victorians’ and the dissertation’s concerns can by split into three broad
categories: 1) the intersections between Aesthetics and Sympathy 2) the
useful confusions of Representation and Reality and 3) Gender. Drawing all
three categories together, I make the case that the aesthetic power of the
Victorian heroine matters not simply as a sign of moral character or social
ideal but as an epistemological challenge to her reader, one that critiques our
perceptions of the physical world even while encouraging us to read it better.
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Asserting the importance of these critical beauties, this project establishes the
centrality of aesthetics to feminism, and of feminism to aesthetics.
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1
Introduction
My dissertation examines the philosophical and literary difficulties
encountered by the Victorians John Ruskin and George Eliot in making their
cases for beauty as a moral force in society with special attention to the role
of beautiful women and feminized beauty. For Ruskin and Eliot the ideal
good woman possesses not a simple political and moral power but primarily
an aesthetic power which encompasses both politics and morality and which
works at a visceral rather than a rational level.
In addition to Eliot and Ruskin, who are often linked in their shared
conception of realism, I look at David Hume who is not so much a source as
a participant in this whole framework of thinking which allows us a
convenient way to examine ideas of sympathy and idealism through an
empirical (concerned with an epistemology of the senses) lens. I do not use
Hume as a link in a “history of ideas,” but as a catalyst to my own thinking
about how Eliot and Ruskin understand women to have moral power.
Briefly, the dissertation’s concerns can be split into three categories:
1) Aesthetics and Sympathy 2) Representation and Reality and 3) Gender.
The gaps between the items in the first two categories allow Ruskin and Eliot
a space for an ethic of realization—to take the aesthetic and make it
sympathetic, to take a representation and make it real. Even gender can be
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seen in this light: to make women as “beautiful” in all the ways they are
“meant” to be, and even to take men and make them more “feminine” in a
moral-aesthetic sense as well. This ethic of realization could also be called
an aesthetics of activity—so a seemingly passive category like the beautiful
becomes an actively creative one (not just in the mental and ideological
creations that we make to cope with/explain our responses to beautiful things,
but also in the beauty we create in our willed creations of/perceptions of the
world).
I often may seem to conflate the ideas of beauty, idealism, and the
visionary. Reading of the world in an ideal or visionary way is for these
writers an intensely aesthetic experience. The characters who do so are
creating an (only partly-imagined) beautiful world which they respond to
with yearning, pleasure, joy, and relief. These terms, especially for that
intricately organic thinker, Ruskin, are already closely intertwined.
The first two chapters deal primarily with Eliot’s Adam Bede.
Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens,” and Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste.”
The first establishes their differing links between beauty and sympathy,
examining why they believe that beauty has such power that it can be turned
to moral use, and how women can serve as aesthetic object. The second
chapter steps back from the clarity of the first’s apologia for the engendering
power of beauty and perspective in world. Here I explore in detail the way in
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which these writers understand how imagination and sense response work
together to “read” the world. Moral questions become more foregrounded
here as these readers becomes more like “critics”—what is the “correct”
judgment of this world we read and can we really make such a claim? The
chapter also considers the consequences of various answers to these
questions, especially the consequences for women.
The third chapter explores Eliot’s and Ruskin’s lingering suspicion of
beauty, an uneasiness signified in their use of the metaphor of “ornament” in
Felix Holt and Seven Lamps of Architecture. For Ruskin, an architectural
ornament may have a proper or an improper relationship to the building
which it decorates. For Eliot, a woman may become an “ornament” in the
world, a useless thing with no relation to others or understanding of herself.
Eliot presents the reformation of a flawed heroine through her eventual
combination of the roles of aesthetic object and moral critic (both of the
world and of herself as object).
The fourth chapter analyzes Eliot’s Middlemarch as an attempt to
present a visionary heroine within the conventions of a realist novel. The
fifth chapter examines Eliot’s pushing of this endeavor further by attempting
to represents the visions as well as their seer in Daniel Deronda. Daniel, like
Middlemarch’s Dorothea, tries to see the world coherently, beautifully (or,
tries to see a coherently beautiful world). Like Ruskin’s Queen and Hume’s
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critic in the best sense—these two desire knowledge as feeling, a felt
experience of the world. In these novels, beauty and the dilemma of how we
readers are to employ and understand our own taste play a substantial role in
her argument for the ideal, or as she calls it, the Romantic.
In my study of these strands of thought, I have not found much
criticism that is sympathetic to either my approach or my combination of
topics. There have been literary studies of women’s position and influence in
the nineteenth-century novel, most notably Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and
Domestic Fiction and Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels which argue
that these novels and the marriage plots of their bourgeois heroines mystify
the emerging economic hegemony of the middle classes. There have been
studies of Nineteenth-Century aesthetics, the latest and best of which is
Kathy Psomiades’ Beauty’s Body, which focuses mainly on feminine beauty
and the late-century aesthetic movement. But there is no study bringing the
two together to explore how the effect of woman’s physicality, the power of
her aesthetic attractiveness both in the realm of interpersonal relationships
and the cultural imagination (not that the two are so easily separated), might
have been understood.
More helpful has been that work which studies the philosophical
underpinnings and implications of Eliot’s work. These, however, are rarely
focused on women or aesthetics (except as it plays a role in the construction
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of her realism). Particularly insightful are George Levine’s The Realistic
Imagination and his essay “George Eliot’s Hypothesis of Reality” and
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth’s “George Eliot’s Conception of Sympathy.”
Similarly, there is some work on Ruskin’s influence on Eliot’s idea of
realism, but it tends to focus on her review of the third volume of his Modem
Painters, rather than bringing his social thought and her fiction together.
The school of criticism of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (the second
half of which is also called “Of Queens’ Gardens,” the title which I will use
throughout) is small but intense. Starting with Kate Millet’s feminist attack
on these lectures as the supreme Victorian mystification of patriarchal power,
the common view of these texts was that they epitomized some Victorian
virgin/whore complex. In the last decade, however, there have been a
handful of attempts to read them more sympathetically. Best of these is Chris
Vanden Bossche’s wonderful essay, “The Queen in the Garden/The Woman
of the Streets” which reworks our understanding of “separate spheres”
ideology. Also interesting is Sharon Weltman’s attempt in her Ruskin’s
Mythic Queen to read his female figures as “subversive” by focusing of their
mythological associations.
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6
Works Cited
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the
Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Bossche, Chris R. Vanden. “The Queen in the Garden/The Woman of the
Streets: The Separate Spheres and the Inscription of Gender.” Journal
of Pre-Raphaelite Studies ns 1 (1992): 1-15.
Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. “George Eliot’s Conception of Sympathy.”
Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40 (1985): 23-42.
Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic
Ideology in Victorian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.
Levine, George. “George Eliot’s Hypothesis of Reality.” Nineteenth-
Century Fiction 35 (1980): 1-28.
—. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady
Chatterlev. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in
British Aestheticism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
Weltman, Sharon Aronofsky. Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in
Victorian Culture.
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7
Chapter One
Reading Beauty: Woman as the Beautiful in “Of Queens’ Gardens” and
Adam Bede
. . . .Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you
have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact
truth, even about your own immediate feelings—much harder than to
say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight
in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a
source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of monotonous
homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among
my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence or
tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn without shrinking
from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors,
to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary
dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of
leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning
wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which
are the precious necessaries of life to h er... .
. . . things may be lovable that are no altogether handsome, I
hope?
Adam Bede Chapter 17
In Chapter 17 of Adam Bede the story famously “pauses for a while”
as George Eliot lays out her case for an aesthetic of sympathy. Although she
argues that we must practice finding our everyday “clumsy” and “vulgar”
neighbors beautiful in order to “widen” our sympathies, the hero of the novel
is faced with far more traditional beauties, both “the beauty of form” and the
beauty of spirit as embodied by Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris respectively.
It is through his association with these women that Adam becomes a better
man. John Ruskin, too, believes that the beautiful woman can be a force for
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good not, or not only, as a moral agent who acts in the world, but as an object
in that world, an object to be seen and thus interpreted by others—primarily,
though not solely, by men. The challenge for any explanation of how
woman’s beauty can be a moral good lies in the uncertainty about where that
goodness resides—whether it exists objectively in the world or subjectively
in one’s interpretation of the world.
Locke’s tabula rasa proposes that we know the world primarily
through our senses and secondarily through the inductive and deductive
inferences we make about it based upon what those senses tell us. Such an
epistemology poses a problem for any simple understanding of morality: it
makes us question whether good and evil, justice and injustice, and other
abstractions like them exist in the world beyond our own minds. This
Enlightenment legacy of doubt haunts Victorians like John Ruskin and
George Eliot and troubles the idea that anything beyond the self, including
other people, especially the women under such ideological pressure, can
either represent goodness or even be goodness, in and of themselves.
Ultimately both writers explore how to get the actual world to match the
moral world as represented by the products of the mind—those words and
ideas which are so in need of defense—to make the world represented by
those words as real as possible, not only for self but for others.
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This chapter explores the superficially similar but radically different
ways in which Ruskin and Eliot link beauty to sympathy. I begin, however,
with David Hume’s brief description of the origin of moral language, a
creation which poses a challenge to any later use of those words in a “real”
way.
Women, Words, and Things
David Hume, the radically skeptical Enlightenment philosopher,
would never say that women, beautiful or not, could be objects imbued with
moral power in and of themselves. In addition to the eighteenth-century view
of woman’s nature that make such a belief unlikely, Hume’s epistemology
argues that we cannot make any claims about things in the world; our only
certainties can be the impressions and ideas that our senses relay to us. While
Hume rarely speaks of women, in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” he
does discuss moral words—things in the world to which men respond as if
they carry moral meaning. Hume finds morality in our responses to the
world, a morality that is only reflected in the language that describes those
responses. The relationships between this response and this language and the
world itself are a few of the many things to doubt:
It is indeed obvious, that writers of all nations and all ages concur in
applauding justice, humanity, magnanimity, prudence, veracity; and
in blaming the opposite qualities... .But we must allow, that some
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10
part of the seeming harmony in morals may be accounted for from the
very nature of language. The word virtue, with its equivalent in every
tongue, implies praise, as that of vice does blame. .. .(228)
This passage shows the limits of language in representing the things of the
world, things which include our reactions to it. We will of course praise the
praiseworthy and blame the blameworthy, but such an agreement is in itself
an artificial one, a product of linguistic logic rather than moral judgment.
Left in question is what, besides praise, words like “virtue” imply, what the
proper (ethical or moral) signifieds for these common (linguistic) signifiers
might be.
While Hume’s only certainty about moral language is that it confirms
the fact that we have moral feelings, he does, he must, assume that words
refer to something beyond the self as well. He finds that effective ethical
pronouncements include some specific signified along with the marker of
judgment (praise or blame):
The merit of delivering true general precepts in ethics is indeed very
small. Whoever recommends any moral virtues, really does no more
than is implied in the terms them-selves. That people who invented
the word charity, and used it in a good sense, inculcated more clearly,
and much more efficaciously, the precept Be charitable, than any
pretended legislator or prophet, who should insert such a maxim in his
writings. Of all expressions, those which, together with their other
meaning, imply a degree either of blame or approbation, are the least
liable to be perverted or mistaken. (229)
Although he concludes this passage by emphasizing the importance of moral
response to such “expressions,” he begins it by pointing out how ineffective
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is the communication of response alone. Ordering people to “do good” is
merely to reconfirm that “good” is good, merely adding the authority of the
speaker’s voice to the approbation carried by the term itself. Maxims, then,
are redundant—the word “charity” can carry social approval all on its own.
His only example, however, of what “other meaning” may be included is one
that we would rarely experience: Hume imagines an original moment when a
term is invented, an invention that is “used in a good sense,” or used to
signify correct examples of it, either in others’ or in the inventors’ own
behavior. This fantasy allows the signifier and signified to exist
simultaneously and thus powerfully, if only briefly and in his imagination.
All later uses of the term are displaced in time from this original
understanding and must refer not so much to ‘real’ instances of, for example,
“being charitable,” as to conceptions of what the word may mean. Too often,
from Hume’s perspective, those conceptions are hopelessly vague: in using
the word “charity,” legislators and prophets are not inculcating charitable
behavior (which Hume implies would be their duty) but are invoking an
ambiguous category that, for the most part, only implies approbation, offering
little help in understanding its “other meaning,” how to be charitable. It is
strange that his one example o f a word “used in a good sense” is of a
necessarily imaginary historical point when the link between signifier and
signified was forged—when word and deed were present anew and at once.
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But it is an example that confirms his main thesis: that only our responses are
verifiably real.
The need, of course, is to re-forge that link between a moral
vocabulary and the actions and emotions they designate. Hume is proposing
that we learn to use words “in a good sense”: the use of a word should be
accompanied by illustration, whether in more specific words or in deeds.
Maxims, on their own, keep these powerful words in the realm of language;
they need to be re-associated with things in the world, however doubtful we
may be about them. Such a continual pressing of the links between words
and things would not only make the social world a morally better place
(through good actions) but also make its culture a healthier one as well
(through meaningful words). For Hume, however, such re-forging is
necessarily limited: in isolated moments the word can once again and
momentarily point to specific moral acts. The word can only carry that
“other meaning” when used in a situation of naming: speaker, observer, act,
word.
In contrast, in “Of Queens’ Gardens,” his essay on women’s place in
the world and her power to save that world from itself, John Ruskin argues
for something more encompassing than effectively encouraging good deeds.
He too sees the problem of how to influence others morally as a need to re
associate words with things. For Ruskin, however, the problem is not
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13
epistemological or linguistic, but moral. As the association between words
and things is already and always objectively real to Ruskin, he finds doubt in
the individual mind: that is where the links need to be reforged. The problem
lies not with words, but with our refusal to understand them and to act by
them. His definition of the words “Lady” and “Lord” lays out both his
confidence in the referential nature of words to the world, and his lack of
confidence that individuals recognize that meaningfulness as they should:
I would have [the women of England] desire and claim the title of
Lady, provided they claim, not merely the title, but the office and duty
signified by it. Lady means “bread-giver” or “loaf-giver,” and Lord
means “maintainer of laws,” and both titles have reference, not to the
law which is maintained in the house, nor to the bread which is given
in the household; but to law maintained for the multitude, and to
bread broken among the multitude. So that a Lord has a legal claim
only to his title in so far as he is the maintainer of the justice of the
Lord of lords; and a Lady has legal claim to her title only so far as she
communicates that help to the poor representatives of her Master,
which women once, ministering to Him of their substance, were
permitted to extend to that Master Himself; and when she is known,
as He Himself once was, in breaking of bread. (18: 138)
Echoing Hume’s belief that moral words mainly convey a sense of praise or
blame, Ruskin is disdainful of those women who would “claim the title” of
Lady for mere approbation only. Instead, they should consider the “other
meanings” that earned that title approbation in the first place, meanings that
are available to wom en at several levels. In the m ost obvious sense, wom en
should become literal “bread-givers,” Ruskin’s etymological foundation.
Indeed, the women of England will not truly have earned the honor of the
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14
title until they are not known just by it, but also by the action the title
signifies, the “breaking of bread.” Ruskin’s conception of language takes the
social origin of moral language implicit in Hume’s explanation of “charity,”
which is there displaced onto a past moment, and makes the case for the
continuous equivalence of social action and linguistic meaning in the present
day. With their linking of the word to the action in the world, the Queens
will “reinvent” charity every day. They are not “pretend” legislators and
prophets, but virtue embodied and displayed.1
In addition to the moral approval carried by their title and to the
specific deeds they can perform in the actual world, Ruskin also sees Ladies
as beautiful, which adds infinitely to their moral power. “Bread-giving” can
be read as a metaphor for a range of other kinds of “giving,” and so can imply
other charitable acts as well as more abstract concepts like “charity” and
“generosity.” Women, then, must recognize they exist in a typological world,
where “material things,” including themselves, “[convey] the idea of
immaterial ones.” Ladies are Typical Beauties, and as such are always
available to interpretation. Perhaps even more important for Ruskin, though,
is the spirit implied by the act of giving—the attitude that the action and thus
the word presupposes— the desire to do good, yes, but also the love and
pleasure in the doing of it. Ladies are also Vital Beauties: in addition to
typologically conveying “immaterial meanings” women will also convey
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vitality, or the “appearance of felicitous fulfillment of function in living
things, more especially the joyful and right exertion of perfect life” (4: 64).
A lady is moral perfection itself—in action, in spirit, in her very being.
Ruskin’s charge that women be true Ladies is a polysemous one. Such a
practice should revivify not only the social role but also the word itself,
lending it layers of meaning beyond its simple denotation, layers which will
enable it to act more powerfully in the world.
For George Eliot, the links between things in the world and the
meanings we find in them is much more complex than either Hume or Ruskin
allow. She echoes Hume in her distrust of any facile use of moral language
or ideas. But she is as attracted as her contemporary, Ruskin, to their
richness and power. In Adam Bede, her first novel, she explores many of the
places where we traditionally believe that morality may reside: in Nature, in
emotions, in culture. The novel’s pastoral setting allows for an evocation and
critique of our belief in the meaningfulness of the natural world—its beauties
and its terrors—while its story of the havoc a shallow dairymaid wreaks in
the lives of the people who love her allows for an exploration of the power
and meaning of feminine beauty in particular.
One of Eliot’s first achievements is to disrupt any simple linkage
between feminine beauty and goodness. This disruption marks her most
clearly skeptical moment in the novel: the things in the world do not match
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16
our ideas about them. Hetty Sorrel, the orphaned niece of a tenant farmer, is
first introduced in rather staged contrast to her cousin Dinah Morris. Both
girls are described as existing amid a variety of reflective household objects:
Hetty Sorrel often took the opportunity, when her aunt’s back was
turned, of looking at the pleasing reflection of herself in those
polished surfaces, for the oak-table was usually turned up like a
screen, and was more for ornament than for use; and she could see
herself sometimes in the great pewter dishes that were ranged on the
shelves above the long deal dinner-table, or in the hobs of the grate,
which always shone like jasper.
This passage sets the novel’s pattern: Hetty’s beauty is always described in
the context of its being observed—by herself as often as by others. Hetty
finds pleasure in her reflection, even in faulty mirrors that throw back
imperfect images—a hint, perhaps, that her image is not functional, that it
does not refer to any truth about her. She is classed with the “ornamental”
shine of the table, set aside from everyday use just as she is using the moment
to escape from her everyday chores. The next paragraph describes Dinah, her
main foil, who, of course, is not looking at herself:
Everything was looking at its brightest at this moment, for the sun
shone right on the pewter dishes, and from their reflecting surfaces
pleasant jets of light were thrown on mellow oak and bright brass;—
and on a still pleasanter object than these; for some of the rays fell on
Dinah’s finely-moulded cheek, and lit up her pale red hair to auburn,
as she bent over the heavy household linen which she was mending
for her aunt. (117-18)
Hetty looks for reflections of herself in the highly polished household
objects, signs of the family’s worth. Dinah as a “still pleasanter object than
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17
these” is thus suggested to be the family’s true wealth (although her mending
assists in the preservation of that other kind). This introduction of Hetty’s
subtly belittles her twice: first in exposing her vanity and second in
contrasting her to Dinah who is lit not by her own admiration but by the rays
of the sim. Eliot is playing upon codes of femininity—skeptical codes which
are as powerful as the idealistic ones she will eventually skewer—to set up
Hetty as a rather common sort of girlish character.
In Adam Bede Eliot neither dismisses beautiful women nor idealizes
them, but rather attempts to explain how their beauty works in the world.
The easy dismissal of Hetty that the narrator’s distantly omniscient
introduction of her suggests does not represent Eliot’s final position. The
first full description of Hetty as she works in her uncle’s dairy illustrates the
power of her beauty, a power that is not so easily dismissed. The entire
passage emphasizes her physicality, which now has the ability to distract the
narrator as well as Arthur Donnithome, the local squire’s heir, who watches
her. In the midst of a detailed description of the dairy, the latest stop in
Arthur’s day and a scene “certainly worth looking at,” Eliot interrupts that
looking to claim: “But one gets only a confused notion of these details when
they surround a distractingly pretty girl o f seventeen, standing on little
pattens and rounding her dimpled arm to lift a pound of butter out of the
scale.” That her beauty has the power to distract the narrator, as well as
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18
Arthur, from the task of description is reinforced by another disruption of the
scene, this time by a short philosophical discourse on beauty itself:
There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of
themselves in various styles, from the desperate to the sheepish; but
there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not
only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a
beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle
rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle
and to engage in conscious mischief—a beauty with which you can
never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to
comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you, Hetty Sorrel’s
was that sort of beauty. (127-8)
For Eliot, Hetty illustrates a problem with the power of beauty, a problem
that neither Hume nor Ruskin seem to recognize as such: our responses to
beauty, in spite of our efforts to explain them, are unwilling and irrational.2
What is especially extraordinary about this beauty, and about Eliot’s
understanding of aesthetic response, is that it can produce not only pleasure
in the observer but also irritation—so much irritation that “you feel ready to
crush it.” This “inability to comprehend the state in which it puts you” is a
failure of understanding our instinctive actions and visceral responses, but it
is also one of language, revealing the lie of our assertions of power over the
world through the creations of “orders” and other attempts to classify and
thus contain the unmanageable. Feelings are not as accessible to language or
to culture as we would like to believe and neither is the beauty that prompts
them. Both escape our control.
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As Eliot is not interested in any clean break between beauty and
character, neither does she resort to any simple theory of beauty’s dominance
of those affected by it. Like any stereotypical flirt, Hetty herself is aware of
her beauty’s power:
Hetty blushed a deep rose-colour when Captain Donnithome entered
the dairy and spoke to her; but it was not at all a distressed blush, for
it was inwreathed with smiles and dimples, and with sparkles from
under long curled dark eyelashes.. . .Hetty tossed and patted her
pound of butter with quite a self-possessed, coquettish air, slily
conscious that no turn of her head was lost. (127)
While Hetty’s consciousness of her looks and their effect on others is yet
another sign of a flaw in her character, this consciousness also troubles any
simplistic aesthetic scenario: aesthetic philosophers rarely attribute awareness
to their objects, even when those objects include women—though when they
do, they too tend to name such awareness as “coquetry.” But Eliot does not
see the complicity with beauty’s power as limited to its possessor: she does
not make Hetty vain and “slily” flirtatious simply as a confirmation of the
dangerous frailty of women. The difficulty of making the break between
appearance and character is represented most clearly by Hetty’s aunt, Mrs.
Poyser, “who professed to despise all personal attractions and intended to be
the severest of mentors” and yet who “continually gazed at Hetty’s charms by
the sly, fascinated in spite of herself.” Hetty’s beauty draws this observer
into complicity with its “slyness”—both Hetty and her aunt affect a lack of
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awareness of the young girl’s “charms.” Even “after administering such a
scolding as naturally flowed from her anxiety to do well by her husband’s
niece—who had no mother of her own to scold her, poor thing!—she would
often confess to her husband, when they were safe out of hearing, that she
firmly believed, ‘the naughtier the little huzzy behaved, the prettier she
looked.’” This aunt, who has the clearest notion of her niece’s character, is
perhaps the best witness to the power of beauty: in addition to her theory that
appearance and behavior can have an inverse relationship (the worse she
behaved, the better she looked) which reinforces the novel’s point that beauty
is a completely unreliable indicator of character, Mrs. Poyser acknowledges
that even suspicion has limited power to disarm beauty’s fascinations. Mrs.
Poyser illustrates how beauty has the power to make us complicit in our own
fascination with it, both in the codes we use to attempt to control that
response and the “slyness” we resort to in an attempt to hide that knowledge
from both others and ourselves.
The crucial sign of beauty’s power to conquer both reason and will is
the narrator’s admission of the limitations even a master of mimetic prose
faces in representing it through language. Perhaps in defense of those men
made “fools” by her beauty, and in answer to any objections from readers
confident in their own powers of discernment, Eliot couches her closest
description of Hetty in self-deprecating terms:
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It is of little use for me to tell you that Hetty’s cheek was like a rose-
petal, that dimples played about her pouting lips, that her large dark
eyes hid a soft roguishness under their long lashes, and that her curly
hair, though all pushed back under her round cap while she was at
work, stole back in dark delicate rings on her forehead, and about her
white shell-like ears; it is of little use for me to say how lovely was
the contour of her pink and white neckerchief, tucked into her low
plum-coloured stuff bodice, or how the linen butter-making apron,
with its bib, seemed a thing to be imitated in silk by duchesses, since
it fell in such charming lines, or how her brown stockings and thick-
soled buckled shoes lost all that clumsiness which they must certainly
have had when empty of her foot and ankle;— of little use, unless you
have seen a woman who affected you as Hetty affected her beholders,
for otherwise, though you might conjure up the image of a lovely
woman, she would not in the least resemble that distracting kitten-like
maiden. (128)
Since Eliot does, obviously, tell us these things, creating at least some
“image” of her in the reader’s mind, the problem is not strictly visual.
Echoing Hume’s understanding of moral words as primarily a sign of our
possession of moral responses to the world, Eliot defines this “lovely
woman” not only through her color and shape, but also and primarily through
the effect that those colors and shapes have upon an observer. Because this
effect cannot be imitated, can only be called forth by actual beauty, the reader
must rely upon his or her own memory of a similar experience in order to
really visualize the type of beauty that Eliot is writing about. The recalling of
the feelings of that past experience and the combination of them with the
visualization of the details supplied by the narrator here is the only way for
the reader to create at least a resemblance of Hetty Sorrel. Eliot uses the
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failure of mimesis, the failure of the words on the page to represent the
“actual” world, to enlists the reader’s participation in finding a way around
such limitations.
This scene is also the first of several that link Hetty’s beauty to
Nature. The immediate similarity between the two is the equal impossibility
of representing the effect that Nature’s beauty has on certain observers:
I might mention all the divine charms of a bright spring day, but if
you have never in your life utterly forgotten yourself in straining your
eyes after the mounting lark, or in wandering through the still lanes
when the fresh-opened blossoms fill them with a sacred, silent beauty
like that of fretted aisles, where would be the use of my descriptive
catalogue? I could never make you know what I meant by a bright
spring day. (128)
The “meaning” of a bright scene day, for Eliot, is its ability to charm—that
power over our consciousness even to the point that we “utterly forget”
ourselves—which is ultimately more important than a “descriptive catalogue”
of its individual “charms.” This connection between the material, and thus
describable, characteristics of beautiful objects or scenes and the physical or
emotional effect that those characteristics produce is an empirical
commonplace. However, Enlightenment philosophers tend to see our
response to beauty as important only in helping us to identify beautiful
objects or “orders of beauty” or in qualifying those observers whose response
is especially sensitive as men of taste. Here, in bringing attention to its
absence in the faulty mimesis of readerly experience, Eliot is beginning to
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make a case for the importance of our response to beauty beyond such
esoteric categorization.
Erroneous Theories and Sublime Feelings: Misreading Hetty Sorrel
Eliot’s representation of Hetty is achieved through a series of
changeable narrative voices, assembling a variety of shifting responses to this
one object in the world. Though they all conveniently call that it “Hetty,”
these “observers” are responding to and their words describe an object which
is ultimately different for each of them. By the conclusion of this parade,
Eliot has made the case that the influence of the beautiful has very little to do
with the beautiful object itself (or herself). What we “see” in the beautiful is
a reflection of the kind of value we award to our own emotional responses—
our own construction of feeling.
Although Eliot is clearly skeptical about any link between beauty and
character, any skepticism that finds it easy to “rationally” dismiss beauty and
its power altogether is equally as dangerous. Of the improper reactions to
beauty, this complacently skeptical response seems the one closest to Eliot’s
own anti-metaphysical stance, and so is the most difficult to argue against.
We can see this difficulty in the complexity of tone and perspective Eliot puts
into play during the scene of Hetty’s dressing herself for Arthur’s birthday
feast. The narrator here mimics one rather patronizing rationalist explaining
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to another the folly of trying to understand Hetty’s pleasure in her appearance
and her jewelry:
Do not reason about it, my philosophical reader, and say that Hetty,
being very pretty, must have known that it did not signify whether she
had on any ornaments or not; and that, moreover, to look at earrings
which she could not possibly wear out of her bedroom could hardly
be a satisfaction, the essence of vanity being a reference to the
impressions produced on others; you will never understand women’s
nature’s if you are so excessively rational. (294)
The interlocutor addressed here is imagined to be trying out theories about
feminine behavior (employing a limited definition of “vanity,” for example)
in an attempt to understand Hetty, and by extrapolation, “women’s nature” in
general. Instead of moving immediately into a psychological reading of
Hetty, into a more complex understanding of vanity, or even the allowance
that a woman herself may experience some aesthetic pleasure, as a corrective
and thus a dismissal of that particular position, Eliot has the narrator continue
to play to it. His instructions are to
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 on
one side with an unconscious smile at the earrings nestled in the little
box.(294-5)
To “divest yourself of all your rational prejudices” can either be read as a
preparatory step to identification or as an attempt to achieve objective
distance. The first dismisses her rational capabilities: we should expect as
much rationality from her as we would from a bird. The second reduces her
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to an alien object under a scientific eye. This linking of reason to “prejudice”
mocks not only such pseudo-scientific anthropological thinking, but also the
object under study. Hetty, from this perspective, is the exotic alien,
fascinating but ultimately so small and insignificant that “rational prejudice”
is confounded.
As if to emphasize how little relation Hetty has to human feeling, the
narrator demonstrates Hetty’s lack by presenting the story of these earrings
not through her own memories and feelings, but through others’ expectations
of how she should feel and think. The rational speaker briefly suggests the
possibility that affection for another may be the source of her pleasure in the
earrings: “Ah, you think, it is for the sake of the person who has given them
to her, and her thoughts are gone back now to the moment when they were
put into her hands.” The quick “No” that follows dismisses that expectation
as ridiculous. But instead of turning to Hetty’s actual thoughts about the
jewelry, this speaker proceeds to give the memory she does not have:
Arthur’s memory, not Hetty’s. Juxtaposed in this way with Arthur’s delight
in her “childishness” in asking for the earrings, his delight in her, Hetty’s
present indifference to him is damning. Then the narrator repeats the
negative:
No, she was not thinking most of the giver when she smiled at the
earrings, for now she is taking them out of the box, not to press them
to her lips, but to fasten them in her ears,—only for one moment, to
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see how pretty they look, as she peeps at them in the glass against the
wall, with first one position of the head and then another, like a
listening bird.
Measured against the interlocutor’s projected expectations, against Arthur’s
actual memory, Hetty does seem more like an amoral bird than a human
being.
The speaker finally drops the pretense of interest in Hetty herself; she
has merely been the occasion for him to theorize about the kind of shallow
beauty that he believes her to be. But even this theorizing feels shallow:
It is impossible to be wise on the subject of earrings as one looks at
her; what should those delicate pearls and crystals be made for, if not
for such ears? One cannot even find fault with the tiny round holes
which they leave when they are taken out; perhaps water-nixies, and
such lovely things without souls, have these little round holes in their
ears by nature, ready to hang jewels in.
The tone here, the facetious “it is impossible to be wise on the subject of
earrings,” suggests its opposite: that there is a ready-made wisdom that
condemns such feminine vanity. The speaker’s tone here asks the listener to
collude with him in ignoring that moral conclusion in the pleasure of the
rhetorical game. For that game can cause no harm: Hetty has shown herself
to be beyond help, and the interlocutor has already received that message: if
we were unsure of it before this scene, then the explicit pointing out of
Hetty’s greed, vanity, and lack of affection in the midst of this otherwise
“admiring” commentary would have let us know. The “impossibility” is not
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a true declaration of neutrality, rather it is a show of patronizing indulgence.
Wisdom and folly, in this case, will be over-looked. Neither the transgressor
nor the transgression (the transgression because of the hopelessness of the
transgressor perhaps) is held to be of any importance. It would be a waste of
wisdom to correct such an insignificant, and charming, sinner: her charm,
light as it is, outweighs her soul.
This declaration sidesteps the moral question of Hetty’s own
evaluation of the earrings (we only get the negative: “she’s not thinking of
the giver”)—the scene instead becomes concerned with “our” own response
to beauty; she is merely an aesthetic object, like the “water-nixies,” not a
moral, and morally-vulnerable, creature. However, in drawing attention to
the speaker’s maneuverings, Eliot is actually repudiating this canary-bird
metaphor and all the range of “rational” attitudes that are associated with it.
If the speaker is wrong, then the soul of a pretty girl, even one so shallow as
this, is important. This counter-reading is substantiated by the discovery that
the “water-nixie” allusion is not just a final fantastic flourish. Is Hetty one of
those creatures? Again, the answer is indirect:
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—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 butterfly
sensations into a life of deep human anguish. (295)
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From a position of sympathy, a position that we haven’t experienced in this
scene, Hetty is not a bird, not even a girl, but a “woman.” And not just any
woman but one with an ominous “woman’s destiny before her.” The
“rancorous poisoned garment” hints at how ominous that future will be,
evoking the tragedy of Medea, that most famous murderer of children. What
the skeptically rational perspective on beauty and folly does not admit is that
“fluttering, trivial butterfly sensations” do not exist in isolation, nor are they
permanent. They exist in the world, and in acting in that world, can change
to “deep human anguish.” But sympathy is “too painful” at times, and “deep
human anguish” is an unwieldy emotion in the middle of the very plot that is
racing towards it. As in Greek tragedies, seemingly trivial desires and
decisions are sometimes revealed not to be so by the ominous workings out
of destiny. Eliot only suggests that fate here—as a brief foreshadowing and a
moral note to accompany the charming picture. But she holds back also, I
think, because it is too painful for even Eliot to think of. This moment of
deep sympathy with pain, and self-induced pain at that, remains indirect, is
deferred. And, I think, successfully so. Perhaps the pain of “thinking” about
experiencing such an anguish in the abstract is easier and more poignant than
the actual mimetic representation o f it that w e w ill experience later.3
The skeptic values his own reason and, ironically, his own humanity
more than he does any quality in beauty or beautiful women. In contrast,
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those who find any value in feminine beauty would seem to be responding to
it in a more helpful way. But the kind of value they find in woman, the kind
of character they read in its physical manifestation as beauty, gives such
observers much more scope for mistake. Eliot’s parade of Hetty’s infatuated
observers reveals that the romantic can be just as damagingly blind as the
skeptic.
Eliot introduces us to the complexity of romantic blindness in an early
scene of Hetty playing before her mirror. After detailing Hetty’s enjoyment
of her cheap trinkets and the picture her reflection makes, the narrator breaks
in with a change in tone:
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: there is such a sweet
baby-like roundness about her face and figure; the delicate dark rings
of hair lie so charmingly about her ears and neck; her great dark eyes
with their long eyelashes touch one so strangely, as if an imprisoned
frisky sprite looked out of them. (197)
The narrator mocks those who are so easily enthralled with such beauty,
aping a fatuous spectator to the scene whose claim to “the easiest folly in the
world” casts some doubt on his judgment and illustrates the willfulness of
this kind of male appreciation. The unexpectedness of his own response to
those eyelashes which “touch one so strangely” is transformed into the very
familiar “folly” of “falling” for a “puss,” a “sweet baby-like” creature, an
“imprisoned frisky sprite.” Just as the later, tragic “water-nixie” allusion
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refuses to see her humanity and her power, so does this labeling avoid any
original exploration of her effect upon his emotions. He is blind not only to
Hetty, but also to himself.
Eliot continues to paint an ambiguous picture of this “one” whom
Hetty’s eyes touch so “strangely” as she develops a representation of his kind
of faulty response to beauty. This response tends to diminish beauty’s power
as it domesticates and eroticizes it:
Ah, what a prize the man gets who wins a sweet bride like Hetty!
How the men envy him who come to the wedding breakfast, and see
her hanging on his arm in her white lace and orange blossoms. The
dear young, round, soft, flexible thing! Her heart must be just as soft,
her temper just as free from angles, her character just as pliant. If
anything ever goes wrong, it must be the husband’s fault there: he can
make her what he likes, that is plain. And the lover himself thinks so
too: the little darling is so fond of him, her little vanities are so
bewitching, he wouldn’t consent to her being a bit wiser; those kitten
like glances and movements are just what one wants to make one’s
hearth a paradise. (197)
That generalized “one” becomes “the man,” “the men,” “the husband,” “the
lover,” “every man,” and finally, “the bridegroom.” Through focalizing the
perception of Hetty through these masculine filters, she becomes “a prize,” a
“sweet,” an object to “envy,” a “hanging” thing—all patronizing, all
participating in the myth of sweet, moldable womanhood dependent
com pletely and “happily” on her lucky man. These prospective spectators o f
her wedding each experience an imagined possession of her. Within this
familiar myth, and its easily adaptability to, it seems, a range of men’s tastes,
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any actual woman they are seeing is reduced to a fantasy. This is common
enough gender critique, one that we see fully played out in the Lydgate
marriage in Middlemarch. What is interesting here is how this fantasy is a
reduction not just of woman, but also of the power of her beauty. This
understanding of beauty reduces its dangers. To love her is “folly” not
tragedy, perhaps because her vanities are “little” and “bewitching”—her
wisdom and her weakness are small things, which allows them to be
charming rather than threatening. But so too is her fondness a small thing, a
clinging affection rather than a supportive one. To the extent that Hetty is the
mirror of these men’s desires and ambitions, their valuing of her beauty and
the character they read into it so lightly is an undervaluing of themselves.
These wedding guests imagine that they can read moral value in
woman’s physical being: the bride to be is as soft in character as she is in
form, as humbly adoring of her husband as her stature and her use of his arm
suggest. This misreading of the beautiful woman is primarily an example of
how, and how badly, we read a metaphysics (a world-view) into the objective
world around us, despite our flattering ourselves that we are reasonable
creatures, as no doubt these imagined men would pride themselves to be:
Every man under such circumstances is conscious of being a great
physiognomist. Nature, he knows, has a language of her own, which
she uses with strict veracity, and he considers himself an adept in the
language. Nature has written out his bride’s character for him in
those exquisite lines of cheek and lip and chin, in those eyelids
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delicate as petals, in those long lashes curled like the stamen of a
flower, in the dark liquid depths of those wonderful eyes. How she
will dote on her children! She is almost a child herself, and the little
pink round things will hang about her like florets round the central
flower; and the husband will look on, smiling benignly, able,
whenever he chooses, to withdraw into the sanctuary of his wisdom,
towards which his sweet wife will look reverently, and never lift the
curtain. It is a marriage such as they made in the golden age, when
the men were all wise and majestic, and the women all lovely and
loving. (197-8)
This “great physiognomist” has no very complex hermeneutic: like is drawn
to like (childlike woman to actual children) in this most banal vision (petals,
stamens, little pink florets) of “natural” attraction and affection. “Every
man’s” naive expectation that external form should match internal character
is searingly mocked by the picture of the marriages of the “golden age”—
when majesty supposedly equaled wisdom and loveliness love, when male
supremacy was reflected in the naturalized arrangements of domestic living.
Nature, from this perspective, is all-helpful: interested in man, in his desires
and his happiness. Nature, for this reader, exists at some humanly accessible
level, for she communicates easily, providing him with a “written” evaluation
of “his bride’s character.” Eliot mocks those who believe that the natural
world exists to serve them—especially if that service tends to illustrate a
certain hierarchy of life, with man, as reader, as male reader, near its top.
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Adam’s Story: A “Proper” Misreading
When she turns to Adam Bede, Hetty’s most generous and faithful
suitor, Eliot makes the case that our response to beauty, even feminine
beauty, is of the greatest moral importance. However, the irony of the “great
physiognomist” passage remains as a warning that the way we conceive that
response, the “language” that we often attribute to Nature as “her own” is not
hers, but ours. It is the language, or the pseudo-science (physiognomy), of
“every man in such circumstances.” Although the feelings that the beauties
of life induce may be important, what we do with those feelings—how we
interpret them—is our area of greatest weakness. That warning will haunt
even her depiction of Adam’s love for Hetty.
Although the idealistic or romantic interpretation of feminine beauty
is obviously troubling, Eliot makes sure that we cannot dismiss it entirely by
linking Adam Bede himself to it. Even though she acknowledges that
Adam’s conception of Hetty is a misreading, she presents it as slightly
different from the hypothetical wedding guests:
It was very much in this way that our friend Adam Bede thought
about Hetty; only he put his thoughts into different words. If ever she
behaved with cold vanity towards him, he said to himself, it is only
because she doesn’t love me well enough; and he was sure that her
love, whenever she gave it, would be the most precious thing a man
could possess on earth. Before you despise Adam as deficient in
penetration, pray ask yourself if you were ever disposed to believe
evil of any pretty woman—if you ever could, without hard head-
breaking demonstration, believe evil of the one supremely pretty
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woman who has bewitched you. No: people who love downy peaches
are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly
against it. (198)
When she moves from the imagined wedding guests to Adam, the narrator’s
tone changes. Instead of the mocking “you” or “people,” we find the
somewhat more friendly “our friend Adam Bede.” Although Adam himself
comes in for some irony, it is an altogether more gentle kind, as matches his
more delicate perceptions of his love. Although he is clearly linked to the
“golden age” fantasy of the wedding guests, his explanations of Hetty’s
behavior avoid casting himself as her master. Although he does see her
vanities as “bewitching,” he does not interpret that bewitchment as meant
entirely for his own pleasure. In interpreting her seeming indifference, he is
self-deprecating rather than superior: “she doesn’t love me well enough.”
Although this implies that she can indeed love him “well enough” and that
perhaps she one day will, his misreading of her character overall is generous
rather than self-serving. His belief that her love “would be the most precious
thing a man could possess on earth” distances him from the majestic
husbands who would prefer the “sanctuary of their wisdom” to her company.
Eliot, in claiming Adam, through the appellation “friend,” and more
importantly, through her defense of his “penetration,” is making some
distinction in reaction here. Those who do understand Hetty clearly (even the
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narrator) should not mock an Adam who misunderstands her in such a
generous way.
In light of her concerted effort to expose a variety of false readings of
beauty as dangerous, and indeed to suggest that beauty has no “objective”
meaning to be read at all, such a commendation is strange. Through Adam’s
generous response to Hetty, Eliot begins to make the case that we can read
valuable fictions onto the otherwise morally questionable things in the world:
After all, I believe the wisest of us must be beguiled in this way
sometimes, and must think both better and worse of people than they
deserve. 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. Long dark eyelashes, now: what can be more exquisite? I
find it impossible not to expect some depth of soul behind a deep grey
eye with a long dark eyelash, in spite of an experience which has
shown me that they go along with deceit, peculation, and stupidity.
But if, in the reaction of disgust, I have betaken myself to a fishy eye,
there has been a surprising similarity of result. One begins to suspect
at length that there is no direct correlation between eyelashes and
morals; or else, that the eyelashes express the disposition of the fair
one’s grandmother, which is on the whole less important to us. (199)
After warning us of our tendency to imagine personal messages in Nature,
Eliot now claims that Nature does have “her language,” and that “she is not
unveracious.” “Not un-truthful” does not quite translate into “truth,” and her
suggestion that we might one day “know all the intricacies of her syntax,” but
not “just yet,” seems an indulgence of our pretensions of eventually doing so.
Although the claim that the “wisest of us must be beguiled in this way
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sometimes” may be read as allowing for mistakes even among those who
usually will know better, it is also suggestive of a potential wisdom in
making the mistake itself.
But the passage is ambiguous about which mistake is the valuable
one. The narrator moves between various positions: from rationalizing
Adam’s mistaken misreading, to citing “experience” which shows that such a
linkage of beauty and character is absolutely false, to trying to find value in
the opposite of beauty, in that which prompts her “reaction of disgust.” This
journey of response reveals our tendency to look at the world through some
kind of theory: when one “proves” wrong, we try its opposite. When neither
beauty nor ugliness prove to be the sign of “morals,” the narrator ends the
little story with an amusingly unhelpful interpretation of the vexing eyelashes
as “[expressing] the disposition of the fair one’s grandmother.” While she
may seem to be echoing Hume’s recourse to an imagined historical point
where thing and meaning were in alignment, Eliot here is more obviously
whimsical. We always proceed to use theories in reading the world, even
ridiculous ones. If that is the case, then we should not be in too much of a
hurry to judge those who misinterpret others, especially if that interpretation
is as sympathetic as Adam’s.
The danger of such a suggestion, however, seems to be clear in the
quickness and vigor of Eliot’s return to her attacks on both Hetty’s character
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and those who romanticize her beauty. That we are not to imagine that Hetty
is deserving of Adam’s generosity is made clear when Eliot comments on
Hetty’s own vision of her future:
Does any sweet or sad memory mingle with this dream of the
future—any loving thought of her second parents—of the children she
had helped to tend—of any youthful companion, any pet animal, any
relic of her childhood even? Not one. There are some plants that have
hardly any roots: you may tear them from their native nook or rock or
wall, and just lay them over your ornamental flower-pot, and they
blossom none the worse. Hetty could have cast all her past life behind
her and never cared to be reminded of it again. (199)
While the imagined wedding guests rhapsodize about “How she will dote on
her children!”, Hetty would in reality “have been glad to hear that she would
never see a child again.” Even the ones who enhance the sweetness of her
looks as she tends to them are to her “tiresome” and “the very nuisance of her
life.” Similarly the animals amongst which she appears “so dimpled, so
charming, as she stooped” to feed them, “never touched Hetty with any
pleasure.” Outward softness, once again, does not denote inward feeling.
Indeed, although Eliot has taught us not to depend upon “fishy eyes” over
fine ones, in this household at least “Molly, the housemaid, with a tum-up
nose and a protuberant jaw was really a tender-hearted girl,.. . but her stolid
face showed nothing of [her] maternal delight” in looking after the poultry
(200). Eliot seems tom between two contradictory needs here: the desire not
to condemn Adam overmuch for his mistaken notion of Hetty’s character,
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and the equally compelling desire to prove that that interpretation has
absolutely no grounding in fact. The difficulties in determining how foolish
Adam is about Hetty, lie at least partly in what looks like a contradiction
between the narrative of Adam’s failed loved and the commentary of the
narrator in defense of his feelings.
This variety of defenses of Adam points to what the good or
“generous” response to beauty is not rather than clarifying what it actually is.
Eliot offers a clue to this mystery in the novel’s famous digression on art.
She contrasts a narrow definition of artistic subject matter—which is a
narrow definition of beauty itself—with a more challenging one:
All honor and reverence to beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the
utmost in men, women, and children—in our gardens and in our
houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret
proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy.. . .do not
impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of
Art those old women scraping carrots. (224)
The references to “beauty of form,” to the “cultivation” of it in our
possessions (including people), to “aesthetic rules” and “lofty theories,”
indict the narrowness not only of empirical aesthetics, but also of the moral
philosophies imagined by the same philosophers based upon the same
formulaic reasoning and pre-formulated modes of observation. She seems to
replace the “beauty of form”—or aesthetics—with sympathy, which may
seem an entirely different kind of response to things in the world. But her
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naming “deep human sympathy” “that other beauty” is seriously meant. She
conceives of a relationship in man between sympathy and beauty that works
similarly to Ruskin’s theoretic faculty in his great dissertation on art and its
moral power in the world, Modem Painters.
Ruskin constructs his theoretic faculty in order to explain man’s
capacity to respond to beauty morally as well as physically. Like Eliot,
Ruskin argues for his conception of what is basically a moral-aesthetic sense
against a much narrower theory of our response to beauty. In the century
before Modem Painters, philosophers in the empirical tradition (Hutcheson,
Hume, Burke, Reynolds) had defined the aesthetic response upon strictly
observable criteria: a physical response to the physical qualities of an object.
In fact, a beautiful object would be identified by the experience of
unqualified pleasure we feel in observing it. These thinkers were most
interested in cataloguing the objective qualities (proportion, curvature, color,
smoothness) in the object that produce such pleasure. Like Eliot, Ruskin is
unsatisfied with this adherence to “beauty of form.” Like Eliot, Ruskin
broadens the definition of beauty itself:
Throughout the whole of the organic creation every being in a perfect
state exhibits certain appearances or evidences of happiness; and is in
its nature, its desires, its modes of nourishment, habitation, and death,
illustrative or expressive of certain moral dispositions or principles.
Now, first, in the keenness of the sympathy which we feel in the
happiness, real or apparent, of all organic beings, and which . . .
invariably prompts us, from the joy we have in it, to look upon those
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as most lovely which are most happy, and, secondly, in the justness of
the moral sense which rightly reads the lesson they are all intended to
teach . .. consists, I say, the ultimate perfect condition of that noble
Theoretic faculty.. . . (4: 147)
Ruskin wishes to save beauty from empiricist distinctions which produce a
concept of beauty and our response to it as merely physical. The point of
contention is neither the pleasure involved nor the physical spontaneity of the
response. Rather he questions the specifics of what those pleasurable
feelings are in response to and thus of what those feelings mean. In his view,
the physical pleasure felt upon observing beauty is a compound of emotional,
spiritual, and moral responses. He does not conceive of these multiple
responses as the simultaneous experience of separate, isolated, feelings
(which would posit separate sources for these additional responses). Such a
view would be an expansion of the empirical focus which it is his aim to
correct. For Ruskin, these various responses should not and cannot be
studied separately and in isolation because they do not exist as such. Each
response is entangled with the others; each indicates the others. As these
responses are organically connected, so too are the qualities in the object
which prompt them. This is not a merely physical human body responding
simply to the physicality of another body. This is a physical, emotional,
moral body responding to another body which carries physical, emotional,
and moral meanings.
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For Ruskin, all of these qualities, together, make beauty. In a world
permeated with meaning, our response to beauty is more than simple physical
pleasure because pleasure itself carries meaning. Everything has its place,
but that place is permeated with its relationships to all other things and their
places, and thus to the whole thing. Thus, he defines the beautiful, not as
mere form, shape or color, but as something we find “in the happiness, real or
apparent, of all organic beings”: it is the happiness of fulfilling the proper
role, of being in the proper place. We “look upon those as most lovely which
are most happy” because we sense a connection between external form
(loveliness, beauty) and internal state (happiness). Thus, Ruskin’s conflation
of terms like “perfection, happiness, loveliness” is not the sloppy thinking it
might first appear to be. Rather, “perfection” refers not merely to physical
qualities but to moral character, emotional state, and social fitness. Beauty
implies a manifold “happiness,” while the possession of that happiness would
lend beauty to all forms, even those not beautiful according to strict empirical
criteria.
This perspective that the objects in the world exist in complex organic
relationships to other objects includes man as an essential element of those
relationships. A key component o f beauty’s “happiness” is the fact that man,
in observing, understanding, and appreciating that happiness, now partakes of
it. By comprehending the beauty of the world, man can, at least
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momentarily, experience his own place in its “perfection.” That he does so is
signaled by his feeling of “joy.” Since the experience of the beautiful for
Ruskin is a doorway into comprehending our connection to an organic
universe, we can understand why he would use sympathy as a key faculty in
that experience. Sympathy “invariably prompts us, from the joy we have in
it, to look upon those as most lovely which are most happy”: sympathy is the
mode through which we perceive the organic nature of life: the connection
between loveliness and happiness, and between nature and man. Sympathy
alone does not constitute the theoretic faculty: while sympathy recognizes the
organic nature of life, a second sense, the moral sense, interprets that life
correctly. The moral sense “reads the lesson” that “every being in a perfect
state” is “intended to teach.” It is sympathy, our feelings of “joy,” which
proves that the “moral dispositions or principles” that we find in natural
beauty are “lessons” founded in some universal truth rather than mere fictions
created by man. Together, sympathy and the moral sense make up the
“Theoretic faculty,” a faculty which by its very nature implies a radically
different kind of world than the carefully delineated aesthetic faculty
described by the empiricist tradition. Since sympathy with happiness is a
moral sympathy, an apprehension of “perfection,” the pleasure we find in the
beautiful is both a glimpse of a perfect world, and an act that participates in
the creation of that world in the present.
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This expanded definition of beauty helps to explain the importance
Ruskin accords to feminine beauty in “Of Queens’ Gardens.” As he warns
the guardians of young girls:
Do not think you can make a girl lovely, if you do not make her
happy. There is not one restraint you put on a good girl’s nature—
there is not one check you give to her instincts of affection or of effort
which will not be indelibly written on her features, with a hardness all
the more painful because it takes away the brightness from the eyes of
innocence, and the charm from the brow of virtue. (18: 125)
Fetters and checks would mar her appearance, and thus her ability to convey
in particular her Vital Beauty, the “appearance of felicitous fulfillment of
function in living things, more especially the joyful and right exertion of
perfect life” (4: 64). The most beautiful things in this vital sense are those
“capable of [the] most quick and joyous sensation” (4: 155), a capability that
the observer (man) must be able to see in order to sympathetically intuit that
potential for perfection in the world.
Within the gender framework set up in “Gardens,” men are the ones
we expect to see “hardened,” not women. Man’s “checks” come from “his
rough work in the open world” (18: 122) against which woman must be
careful to preserve her softness and vulnerability (and here we see an
aesthetic reinforcement of separate spheres rather than the hoped-for
extension of the values of one into the other). The stated reason for the
sacredness of woman’s sensibility is, of course, that she will use her ability to
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“feel the depths of [the world’s] pain, and conceive the way of its healing”
(18: 140). The difficulty of actually achieving that healing is not really
recognized in the text; neither is his dearth of advice on the way to achieve
it—as we’ve seen, the most practical, though not the most original,
suggestion is top practice charity like a “Lady.” But as a representation of
vitality, her “healing” would not be necessarily the result of any actual
charitable effort on her part. The important part of her duty, the one that is
stressed repeatedly, is that she “feel” and that she “show” that feeling. Her
primary function, then, is to serve as a model of human “vital” beauty. She
participates in the social reformation or reclamation of England by becoming
a part of Nature— a flower, a fawn, a figure in the Garden. In her vitality, she
participates in the creation of that more perfect world. Thus, woman’s ability
to “feel the depths of pain,” which seems to be the essence of subjectivity,
tends to confirm her as the ultimate object—an object raised in Nature so that
she will be “vital” like the “slender, pensive, fragile flower” of early spring in
the Alps (4: 146-7), whose heroic loveliness calls for, and calls forth, the
sympathy of men.
Eliot’s understanding of the role of women’s beauty finds some echo
in these theories o f Ruskin. Like him, she can see beauty in “old women
scraping carrots”—“that other beauty” that speaks of our “deep sympathy”
with life itself rather than its physical forms:
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In this world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who
have no picturesque, sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we
should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them
quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories
which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore let Art always remind
us of them ... . (224)
With her more expansive vision, she can include the mundane in art which
both empiricist philosophers and the contemporary art establishment would
reject. But she can also embrace the “falsely” beautiful which Ruskin would
have had difficulty acknowledging. For Eliot, cultivating the love of such
beauty, cultivating a response in ourselves to those near to us (the dull and
the flawed)—this is the proper melding of moral and aesthetic argument:
“fellow mortals must be accepted as they are, real breathing men and women
helped by you” (222). Our “help” and our “acceptance” will reinforce each
other.
The change in tone when Eliot moves from describing the misreading
of Hetty by men in general to Adam’s misreading can now be understood in
light of her conception of beauty. In contrast to such declarations as “it is
impossible to be wise” when faced with Hetty, Adam finds “it impossible to
feel otherwise than that she was the prettiest thing in the world” (308). Adam
feels her beauty rather than waxes wise over it: he does not confuse reason
with feeling. Although we can reason about our feelings, we cannot replace
those feelings with reason’s product: those aesthetic theories and “rational
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prejudices” so dear to armchair and real philosophers alike. In Eliot’s effort
to recuperate beauty for the work of humanity, Adam is her central example
of a positive relationship between aesthetics and morality. Adam and Hetty
present a complex nexus of appearance, meaning, feeling, and character.
Adam, too, misinterprets Hetty, but he does so in such a way that he affirms
feeling rather than denigrates or reduces it: he refuses language and its
controls, trusting to his responses instead.
Such a perspective leaves Adam open to attack, but such attacks only
reveal that beauty itself is not so much the issue as taste, or the ability to be
“right” about beauty, is. Eliot follows a description of Adam’s hopeful—yet
completely mistaken—reading of what he sees as Hetty’s growing feelings
for him with a pre-emptive strike against just such an attack, beginning with
the leading observation, “Possibly you think that Adam was not at all
sagacious in his interpretations.” While we hesitate to agree, she
immediately mocks those who expect reason to prevail in the world and so
who judge
. . . that it was altogether extremely unbecoming in a sensible man to
behave as he did—falling in love with a girl who really had nothing
more than her beauty to recommend her, attributing imaginary virtues
to her, and even condescending to cleave to her after she had fallen in
love with another man, waiting for her kind looks as a patient
trembling dog waits for his master’s eye to be turned upon him.
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Eliot shows up the pomposity of such rational judgments. The mistake is
“unbecoming”; Adam is “a patient trembling dog.” This attack is overly
concerned with appearances —with how a lover will be judged by other
observers. Some of the nastiness here may be attributed to the fear that
Adam’s is that “easiest folly in the world,” a folly that must be distanced
from the self as much as possible. This perspective also reveals a limited
understanding of affection itself, reading “falling in love” as nothing more
than a “condescension” on the man’s part. Such a rigorously “correct” view
cannot fail to misunderstand the way in which people actually work:
But in so complex a thing as human nature we must consider it is hard
to find rules without exceptions. Of course, I know that, as a rule,
sensible men fall in love with the most sensible women of their
acquaintance, see through all the pretty deceits of coquettish beauty,
never imagine themselves loved when they are not loved, cease loving
on all proper occasions, and marry the woman most fitted for them in
every respect—indeed, so as to compel the approbation of all the
maiden ladies in their neighborhood. But even to this rule an
exception will occur now and then in the lapse of centuries, and my
friend Adam was one. (399)
The “rule” Eliot creates here about “sensible” men and their equally sensible
women is ridiculous. In their attitude of disdain for Adam, however, rational
readers would be invoking just such a set of expectations about “human
nature,” courtship, and love as seems so unreasonable when they are
articulated as they are here. Neither the feelings of others, nor of the self are
so amenable to control. In seeming to modify a commonly-accepted “rule”
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by defining Adam as an “exception” to it, she is mocking the very idea of
“rules” and “allowances.” The sly use of scientific rhetoric warns against
those who would use the unfortunate Adam as an occasion for displaying
worldly wisdom.
Eliot declares that a generous mistake is to be preferred over such
sterile “correctness.” After the rather complicated play with a variety of
adopted voices, Eliot seems to break through with a straightforward statement
of her own position:
For my own part, however, I respect him none the less: nay, I think
the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded, blossom-like, dark-eyed,
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.
Her change to the use of the first person, amidst all the second and third
person ironic performances, strongly signals her sincerity. Reaching for
feeling, for the ideal that inspires that feeling, is good even if one makes
some mistakes along the way.
What is that response to beauty that makes mistakes of fact or
judgment worthy of respect? From Eliot’s description of Adam’s strength,
we see that it is an amalgam of skeptical and idealistic epistemologies:
Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought upon by exquisite music—to
feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your
soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and
binding together your whole being past and present in one
unspeakable vibration: melting you in one moment with all the
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tenderness, all the love that has been scattered through the toilsome
years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation
all the hard-leamt lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your
present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your
past joy? If not, then neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon
by the exquisite curves of a woman’s cheek and neck and arms, by the
liquid depths of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet childish pout of her
lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music: what can one
say more? (399-400)
Eliot places women’s beauty in the purely aesthetic realm, where it is neither
sexual, nor patronizing, nor self-serving. She is not turning to a metaphysical
perspective like Ruskin’s which would declare that “all the tenderness, all the
love that has been scattered through the toilsome years” is objectively present
in such beauty. Rather, echoing Hume’s commitment to the only verifiable
“thing” in the world, she is describing man’s physiological responses. Unlike
Ruskin’s theoretic faculty, Adam is not feeling the connections between self
and world, or between the various different things in the world. Instead,
music makes him aware of the connections between different parts of the
self—between the self s past and present, the self s joys and sorrows. This
beauty is even more powerful than memory, which is more conscious,
because it works at levels of the self that are unavailable to the mind or to the
will. Adam’s “strength” lies in his ability to feel these connections to
capacity. For those who are “wrought upon” by beauty, whether the beauty
of music or of woman, there is a choice to be made: how to handle this
visceral response. Rather than dismiss it as “unreasonable,” or to contain it
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as a controllable eroticism, the choice represented by Adam is to venerate it
and to simply enjoy it.
But Beauty invokes more than personal, idiosyncratic feeling. Eliot
argues that beauty expresses more meaning than can belong to any single
woman or to any one experience of her:
Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one woman’s soul
that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider meaning than the
thought that prompted them: it is more than a woman’s love that
moves us in a woman’s eyes—it seems to be a far-off mighty love
that has come near to us, and made speech for itself there; the rounded
neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their
prettiness—by their close kinship with all that we have known of
tenderness and peace. (400)
Beauty “clothes” the soul—such clothing has no relation to one “woman’s
love” except that it can enhance such a love so that “it seems to be a far-off
mighty love that has come near to us.” The physical qualities of a woman’s
beauty, her roundness, her softness, even her dimples, call up emotions and
thoughts which are at once personal and universal. They have a “close
kinship” with all that the observer has “known of tenderness and peace.”
They are known in memory and through personal experience, but also,
through the imagination. Hetty’s face holds this kind of beauty: it
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 those
eyes—perhaps paired with pale eyes that can say nothing; just as a
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national language may be instinct with poetry unfelt by the lips that
use it. (330)
After carefully and repeatedly breaking the link between beauty and
metaphysical meaning, Eliot reassociates it with a different kind of meaning.
Eliot is not invoking typology here: there is no actual connection between
Hetty’s face and the “meaning and pathos” with which “nature” has “clothed”
it: Adam responds not to this particular woman, but to her costume. Such an
understanding of how beauty “means” privileges neither some past “original
moment” nor a present moment when sign and what it signifies are one.
Instead, beauty itself is a language, one that has no necessary referent in the
world—beauty refers back to other beauties—but one that we all learn to
speak—“just as a national language may be instinct with poetry unfelt by the
lips that use it.” Now the notion that the grandmother’s character may be
reflected in the granddaughter’s lashes is not so silly a suggestion after all.
Whether “true” or not, our imagining of such a character somewhere makes it
“real” to our moral consciousness. Faces speak a metaphorical language,
which is the kind of speaking that Ruskin and Hume encourage—the constant
enacting of meaning—but here without conscious will.4 The language of the
face constantly reenacts meaning, but it does so in our imagination, and it
does so, perhaps, because we have taught our imaginations to perform that
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service. Here virtues like charity are not reinvented or felt, but only seem to
be. And this seeming, for Eliot, is enough. It must be.
As not everyone feels the poetry of their own language, so only the
noblest characters, like Adam, respond fully to the language of beauty. The
fact that this language refers only to itself is another explanation for Adam’s
vulnerability to mistakes of judgment about Hetty, who definitely belongs to
the world of things. Eliot’s evaluation of such a character is perhaps more
thorny than she intends:
The noblest nature sees the most of this impersonal expression in
beauty (it is needless to say that there are gentleman with whiskers
dyed and undyed who see none of it whatever), and for this reason,
the noblest nature is often the most blinded to the character of the one
woman’s soul that the beauty clothes. Whence, I fear, the tragedy of
human life is likely to continue for a long time to come, in spite of
mental philosophers who are ready with their best receipts for
avoiding all mistakes of the kind. (400)
The ability to see the “impersonal” meaning of beauty is honorable because it
is not blinded by patronizing self-interest (sexual or otherwise). “Mental
philosophers” with their inadequate “receipts” as guides to human nature tend
not to recognize this ingredient in the human makeup. Their recipes are
witnesses to their over-schematized understanding of the complexities of
human interaction. But an Adam-like ability to see is vulnerable to another
kind of blindness: in seeing the “impersonal,” it is apt to miss the particular.
This blindness to the particular may lead to the “tragedy of human life”—the
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tragedy based upon mistakes of fact, of the particular. This kind of tragedy,
though, seems to be a fair price for more sublime vision. In such a case, it
works to our advantage that an “amoral” object can promote virtuous feeling
or acts: it is not the nature of the object that is key, but the nature of its effect.
But there is another tragedy that such blindness to the particular may
provoke: the failure of sympathy with “those old women scraping carrots.”
While Ruskin’s theoretic faculty seems more equipped to handle that
unexpected kind of beauty, Eliot’s language of beauty ignores it altogether.
The novel bears this suspicion out: Adam’s aesthetic response works
perfectly, but to achieve happiness, he must learn that “other beauty”—that
“secret of deep human sympathy.”
Adam’s difficulty with more common forms of sympathy, with seeing
the particular, parallels another problem with Eliot’s linking of morality to
aesthetics: whether or not an Adam-like interpretation of beauty can really be
taught—whether or not it can really be a universal moral tool. The idea that
beauty’s meaning ultimately comes from each individual beholder’s mind has
unexpected implications:
Our good Adam had no fine words into which he could put his
feelings for Hetty: he could not disguise mystery in this way with the
appearance o f knowledge; he called his love frankly a mystery, as you
have heard him. He only knew that the sight and memory of her
moved him deeply, touching the spring of all love and tenderness, all
faith and courage within him. How could he imagine narrowness,
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selfishness, hardness in her? He created the mind he believed in out
of his own, which was large, unselfish, tender. (400)
Adam’s mind, “large, unselfish, tender,” is what qualifies him as an ideal
responder to beauty, especially a theoretic beauty. His empirical response to
beauty is quick and intense, and his mind has room enough for both
memories and imaginings. Like those of Dinah,5 his future wife, Adam’s
combination of physical and mental talents make him a rare character. Adam
sees as Ruskin does, or as Ruskin does in certain moods. The quality of his
character explains the difference between the narrator’s attitude in the
representations of Adam’s misreadings and those of other observers: why the
narrator becomes more indulgent and serious when handling his mistakes.
But the quality of his character also presents us with the question of whether
or not beauty is only a good to those credulous, venerating natures like
Adam’s. It does seem that Eliot wants to make the lesson of sympathy a
universal one, but in choosing this hero to learn that lesson, she stacks the
deck. Adam misreads Hetty in a positive way, but only because he already
has the character to create such a character in her.6
Because Ruskin’s theory of the theoretic faculty depends upon seeing
the relationship between objects and their meanings as objectively real, in his
conception sympathy and aesthetic pleasure can be one and the same. Eliot’s
doubt about such a relationship makes her conjunction of sympathy and
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aesthetics much more complicated. While her theory of the “language of
beauty” may easily ignore the particulars of “actual” life that are so essential
to sympathy, the basic emotional response to beauty can allow for the kind of
connection between people that leads to learning and accepting that kind of
detail and that kind of sympathy.
With all his softness for Hetty, Adam begins the novel as a rather
intolerant person. As Bartle, his old schoolmaster tells him, “you’re over-
hasty and proud, and apt to set your teeth against folks that don’t square with
your notions” (291). He needs to learn the fallibility of his own judgment,
yet retain the veneration that strengthens his responsiveness. In the plot of
Adam’s growth, Eliot presents the ultimate validation of amoral beauty:
Adam must learn “by getting his heart-strings bound round the weak and
erring, so that he must share not only the outward consequences of their error,
but their inward suffering. This is a long and hard lesson” (255). Adam
needs a Hetty because his devotion to her, a devotion inspired by her physical
beauty, will lead him to sympathize with her failings. When the narrator tells
us that “it is too painful to think that [Hetty] is a woman, with a woman’s
destiny before her,” a woman whose “trivial butterfly sensations” will
becom e a “life o f deep human anguish,”7 that “too painful” awareness is
exactly what Adam must experience in order to begin his lesson. As that
phrasing suggests, he experiences that pain through “thinking.” Once he
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leams that Hetty has abandoned her newborn illegitimate child to its death,
“he couldn’t bear to blame her” (442). In his anguish, he exclaims, “O God,
it’s too hard on me—it’s too hard to think she’s wicked” (445). Conceiving
what she has done, and thus beginning to understand her actual character,
causes Adam pain. And that pain fits his weakness, which is his quickness to
judge. An understanding of her recent history begs for a judgment to be
passed upon it. Hetty is the first instance where he does not do so, because
he “cannot bear it.”
Adam’s education in love is yet another validation of “misreading.”
Even the shattering of illusions can ultimately be good because that too is an
experience that touches the feelings: “Deep, unspeakable suffering may well
be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state” (471).
And in Adam’s case it is: he becomes “a soul full of new awe and new pity”
(472). Eliot provides several evidences of his growth, both in his own self-
assessments (“I’m hard, too hard”) and in his attitude and behavior (his
sympathy for Arthur, his old friend, unsuspected rival, and father of the dead
child; and his new tenderness with his younger brother Seth who has always
stood in Adam’s more capable shadow). Adam soon understands the
importance of intense feeling so well that he can use it to argue against
Dinah’s concern that marriage to him will tie up all her sympathies:
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I don’t believe your loving me could shut up your heart; it’s only
adding to what you’ve been before, not taking away from it; for it
seems to me it’s the same with love and happiness as with sorrow—
the more we know of it the better we can feel what other people’s
lives are or might be, and so we shall only be more tender to ‘em, and
wishful to help ‘em. The more knowledge a man has the better he’ll
do ‘s work; and feeling’s a sort of knowledge.’ (553)
As beauty has become a language, “feeling” has become “knowledge.” Such
feeling is the common coin of sympathetic understanding. Adam’s
familiarity with intense emotions allows for easier sympathy (his tenderness
leading to “help”).
Adam’s courtship of Dinah is presented as a natural progression of his
acceptance of pain and human frailty:
Dinah was so bound up with the sad memories of his first passion,
that he was not forsaking them, but rather giving them a new
sacredness by loving her. Nay, his love for her had grown out of that
past: it was the noon of that morning. (536)
We see yet again a reconception of a failed understanding. Hetty’s presence
haunts this courtship, which begins with his liking to see Dinah “continually
—to talk to her with the silent consciousness of a mutual great remembrance”
(534). The otherwise unsatisfactory love story of Dinah and Adam does fit
the story of Adam’s growth: the story of sympathetic feeling. But this
thematic element is the problem: that the object of that feeling, for both of
them, is his first love, and that this love is affirmed rather than diminished in
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the interests of representing his personal growth, forces an imbalance that
casts a pall on his second.
Aside from this birth of new feeling on Adam’s part, what is most
remarkable about Adam’s story is that his basic hermeneutic pattern does not
change. His misreading continues. The final intimation that “clearer” eyes
are not what Eliot is championing in the story of Adam’s infatuation with
Hetty is Adam’s perception of Hetty at her trial:
They were there—the sweet face and neck, with the dark tendrils of
hair, the long dark lashes, the rounded cheek, and the pouting lips:
pale and thin—yes—but like Hetty, and only Hetty. Others thought
she looked as if some demon had cast a blighting glance upon her,
withered up the woman’s soul in her, and left only a hard despairing
obstinacy. But... to Adam, this pale hard-looking culprit was the
Hetty who had smiled at him in the garden under the apple-tree
boughs—she was that Hetty’s corpse, which he had trembled to look
at the first time, and then was unwilling to turn away his eyes from.
(477)
As the narrator notes, “in a corpse we love, it is the likeness we see” (476),
but in this case, that likeness is to a Hetty that never existed except in Adam’s
own mind. He sees neither what “others” at the trial see, nor what the
narrator had led us to see in the garden scene. In the face of all evidence to
the contrary, and despite his own pain at her fall, Adam’s allegiance is to his
own sympathetic vision, to the perception of Hetty as more and better than
she is. Ironically, Hetty has always been just such a corpse: Adam has
always favored his own “likeness” of her. Adam’s allegiance to that
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“likeness” is made all the easier, of course, since her sin and her punishment
will make her forever a memory to him rather than a living being who could
continue to disappoint.
A stronger proof of Eliot’s continued approval of Adam’s misreading
is his repetition of it with Dinah. Although Adam had once wrongly believed
of Hetty’s “slight something, a word, a tone, a glance . . . that she [was] at
least beginning to love him in return,” his reading of Dinah is described in the
same terms:
Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul’s
language; and the finest language, I believe is chiefly made up of
unimposing words.. . : it is only that they happen to be the signs of
something unspeakably great and beautiful. (537)
The “soul’s” language, like Nature’s language, is not always clear about what
it is referencing. The words, and their referents, may be “unimposing” or
they may be “signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful.” Because
the latter is “unspeakable,” because it is a matter of feeling, the sign system
must remain ambiguous. Although it has failed him in the past, Adam does
not stop using the language. It is only with the cooperation of his creator,
Eliot, that this time the signs of love he reads are true enough.
He continues to use the language of Nature as well. On hearing the
harvesters in the distance announcing their last load with the chant, “Harvest
Home!,” he reflects:
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It’s wonderful,. . . how that sound goes to one’s heart almost like a
funeral-bell, for all it tells one o’ the joyfullest time o’ the year, and
the time when men are mostly the thankfullest. I suppose it’s a bit
hard to us to think anything’s over and gone in our lives; and there’s a
parting at the root of all our joys. It’s like what I feel about Dinah: I
should never ha’ come to know that her love ‘ud be the greatest o’
blessings to me, if what I counted a blessing hadn’t been wrenched
and tom away from me, and left me with a greater need, so as I could
crave and hunger for a better comfort. (559)
Adam places his love for Dinah in a “natural” context, the yearly harvest.
This particular interpretation gives him a rationale for loving and continuing
to love both women. But more importantly, the invocation of change, of the
“parting at the root of all our joys,” as the changing seasons allow for
planting and harvesting, for life, once again increases his feeling (“going to
the heart almost like a funeral-bell”). He responds not just to the beauty of
Dinah, or to the beauty of his love for her, but also to the beauty of this new
idea, of the entwined patterns of human life and of nature.
But What About Hetty? The Fate of the Catalyst
Adam reads into Nature in a good way, in a way that echoes Ruskin,
but which the narrator supports, not because Adam’s interpretations are
empirically valid, but because they prompt and enhance his feeling. Because
beauty acts as a catalyst for positive feeling, it can be used in a program of
moral growth through sympathy. Because the beauty we respond to is not
just a physical quality, but includes cognitive perceptions and other kinds of
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knowledge (and can sometimes be entirely cognitive—the abstract ideas we
associate with the beautiful), this morally useful response can be conditioned
to include the dull, and even the amoral. What is, objectively, a misreading
will likely not cause a problem because the response is the important thing,
and even disillusionment can ultimately be a positive experience and a
foundation for the commonality of sympathy.
Such a program of moral growth through the experience of beauty
almost completely ignores a crucial element: the catalyst for that change, the
beautiful itself. It is one thing to respond to music or to nature in an idealized
way: neither is likely to suffer from any misreading; neither will feel any
effects from being “used” in this way. Hetty Sorrel, though, is an entirely
different case. For all the calls to sympathy for a variety of different
characters, Hetty is the one whose allotment of concern and love is
incommensurate with the utility most of the others, including her author, find
in her.
The emphasis on feeling which is so important to Eliot’s conception
of beauty and sympathy results in the displacement of the thing that provokes
it. The day that Adam comes upon Hetty picking currants is a key scene of
misreading:
Adam’s heart was too full to speak, and he thought Hetty knew all
that was in it. She was not indifferent to his presence after all; she
had blushed when she saw him, and then there was that touch of
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sadness about her which must surely mean love, since it was the
opposite of her usual manner, which had often impressed him as
indifference. (265)
Of course, he is reading these signs incorrectly, as the narrator reminds us:
“You know quite well that Adam was mistaken about her. Like many
another man, he thought the signs of love for another were signs of love
towards himself.” But even so, his mistake and the feelings that result are
producing something of value: a memory. Long after Adam has fallen in
love with and married Dinah, long after Hetty herself has been transported
from the country and died, that memory still exits: “the first glad moment of
our first love is a vision which returns to us to the last, and brings with it a
thrill of feeling intense and special as the recurrent sensation of a sweet odour
breathed in a far-off hour of happiness.” He no longer needs the actual Hetty
because he has her proxy in his memory:
Hetty bending over the red bunches, the level rays piercing the screen
of apple-tree boughs, the length of the busy garden beyond, his own
emotion as he looked at her and believed that she was thinking of
him, and that there was no need for them to talk—Adam remembered
it all to the last moment of his life. (266)
Hetty’s role as a catalyst of Adam’s feeling, her replacement by an
equivalent, her memory—neither “use” of Hetty is Adam’s fault or his
responsibility. Both uses, though, are the “fault” o f the plot, the
responsibility of the novelist. Hetty’s own feelings, her own responses and
memories, never receive such detailed and respectful attention.
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This imbalance between Hetty and Adam is perhaps due to the fact
that Hetty herself has the simplest responses of anyone in the novel. Of her,
the narrator warns,
we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some
of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have
only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least
under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering
agony. (141)
Hetty shows us why such a limitation of response is unsatisfactory. She is
portrayed in basic empirical terms: “Poor Hetty’s vision of consequences
[was] at no time more than a narrow fantastic calculation of her own probable
pleasures and pains” (385). These pleasures and pains do form the basis for a
rudimentary moral sense. After her rejection by Arthur, a rejection that
makes any “regularization of their relationship” out of her reach, she
understands that others will not approve of her seduction: “They would think
her conduct shameful; and shame was torture. That was poor little Hetty’s
conscience” (382). She is a Lockean human being, responding to pleasure
and pain, but she does so without the understanding or the knowledge to
make other than “fantastic” calculations from those responses. Hetty is as
self-centered as some basic models of empiricism imply. Her conscience is
com pletely self-interested, based upon the pain of feeling shame, a shame
that only others can invoke in her through the communication of their
disapproval. Where Adam and Dinah serve as almost ideal empirical
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creatures, responding to the world emotionally and intellectually on many
levels, Hetty serves as the negative example, one who is still almost
completely a tabula rasa. Eliot uses Hetty to show that in order to “vibrate”
more widely, a human being needs knowledge, especially social knowledge,
either from sympathetic observation or through education (stories, etc.). To
act as a human, one must be connected to the human and have more than
empirically natural knowledge, even of nature.
The limitations of Hetty’s knowledge are at least as responsible for
her tragedy as the limitations of her feeling:
Reasons why he could not marry her had no existence for her mind;
how could she believe in any misery that could come to her from the
fulfillment of all that she had been longing for and dreaming of? She
had not the ideas that could make up the notion of that misery. (379)
As Hume’s man of taste forms his judgments through the use of educated
memories as well as sharpened sensual responses, Eliot’s beauty fails at least
in part because she is not educated8:
She knew no romance, and had only a feeble share in the feelings
which are the source of romance, so that well-read ladies may find it
difficult to understand her state of mind. She was ignorant of
everything beyond the simple notions and habits in which she had
been brought up, to have any more definite idea of her probable future
than that Arthur would take care of her somehow. (418)
Her ignorance makes it impossible for her to understand the danger o f her
situation. What is interesting here, is that the reader’s knowledge may hinder
comprehension equally as well. There is the sense that “well-read ladies,”
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with their familiarity with seduction plots, will too hastily condemn this girl
whose first exposure to such tragedy will be through the shock of her own
experience. Hetty has neither the knowledge, nor the soul, to create either
beauty or evil. All she has is her own pleasure and pain: she is the uncultured
empirical creature, without the mind (the reason) to become a critic or a
judge. Her “innocence” here is at a more fundamental level than her usual
association with kittens and chicks suggests. It is as inhuman, but in the pre-
lapsarian sense: she has barely the knowledge of good and evil. As The Fall
was supposed to make man fully human, so too will hers. Her moment of
despair on the road, heavily pregnant and without friends or shelter, is the
only one dramatized in the novel when she identifies with anything beyond
herself: “but at this moment she felt as if the helpless timid creature had some
fellowship with her” (419). Not surprisingly, the identification is with a dog,
not a fellow human, but Eliot does not write the story of Hetty’s growth that
even this unpromising moment of “fellowship” suggests.
The absence of that story of growth is telling. Eliot continues to use
this character in the pattern set for her: for the plot as for the characters in it,
Hetty is destined to be an object rather than a subject. Hetty is an example:
for the other characters o f the novel the experience of her becomes that
“extra” knowledge, that cognitive addition to simple sense response that
allows us to form complex judgments. Even the attention she receives in the
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depiction of the smallness of her soul and the limitations of her response, is
shared with the sufferings of others in connection with her:
Yes, the actions of a little trivial soul like Hetty’s, struggling amidst
the serious, sad destinies of a human being, are strange. So are the
motions of a little vessel without ballast tossed about on a stormy sea.
How pretty it looked . . . moored in a quiet bay!
‘Let the man bear the loss who loosed it from its moorings.’
But that will not save the vessel—the pretty thing that might
have been a life-long joy. (386)
The attention, or concern, in this passage seems to be evenly split between an
indictment of Arthur—he should be the one to “bear the loss” since he is her
seducer—and an expression of pity for Hetty, who will not be saved even if
Arthur takes up his burden of guilt and responsibility. Eliot even mocks the
idea that such a claiming of responsibility is the solution to Hetty’s “loss.”
However, the metaphor of “a little vessel without ballast” tends to undermine
that sympathy. That “loss” is not Hetty’s, but that of whomever possesses the
boat. And that loss is not the starkest tragedy: Hetty is prettiness and
pleasure, a potential “life-long joy,” but not a deep or serious one. Although
this limited estimation of Hetty’s value is associated with misreaders like
Arthur, it is also one that is echoed in the overall representation of her within
the novel.
The telling o f a pregnant Hetty’s sad flight from home is even more
fraught with problems of narrative voice than the ironic presentation of her
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beauty through various personas earlier in the novel. The narrator’s most
explicit expression of sympathy comes across as overdone:
Poor wandering Hetty, with the rounded childish face, and the hard,
unloving despairing soul looking out of it with the narrow heart and
narrow thoughts, no room in them for any sorrows but her own, and
tasting that sorrow with the more intense bitterness! My heart bleeds
for her as I see her toiling... .God preserve you and me from being
the beginners of such misery! (435).
Perhaps because Hetty has never been described unironically to this point, it
is difficult to understand the “poor wandering Hetty” as a sincere declaration
of feeling. The juxtaposition of the cliched phrase (“My heart bleeds for
her”) with the familiar description of the paradox of her character (soft
appearance and “hard” soul) makes this call to sympathy with her seem a
forced one. The passage ends with concern, not for Hetty, but for “you and
me.” The pain of others serves as a lesson for us. This recasting of pain into
terms “helpful” to us is perhaps another example of man widening his
knowledge and thus feeling. But here the narrator participates rather than
simply represents. In doing so, the otherwise troubling reduction of human
objects to hermeneutic signs receives authorial approval. Because the novel
deals with the character by shipping her off, out of the narrative as well as the
country, only to return in reports of her illness and death, that suspicion is
confirmed. Hetty, rather than being a human subject, is become a piece of
human knowledge. What does it say for a theory that combines beauty with
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sympathy when its main representative of the former receives so little of the
latter?
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Notes
1 A similar concern with proper interpretation of action (or of the motivation
for it) can be found in his defense of marble churches in Seven Lamps of
Architecture : “I do not want marble churches at all for their own sake, but
for the sake of the spirit that would build them.. ..It is not the church we want
but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration: not
the gift, but the giving” (8: 39-40).
2 This has been noted before, and in fact serves as one of the requirements of
the beautiful for many philosophers: the unwilled nature of the response
serves as proof of its disinterestedness. 18th century thinkers (as far as I’ve
seen) don’t see the potential for any resentment or resistance on the part of
the observer in such a relationship.
-3
Personally, I find these few short lines to be the one moment in the novel
where Eliot successfully sympathizes with Hetty. Her own distaste for her as
a character, especially in contrast to the other characters, makes the
“sympathetic” scenes later in the novel come off as forced.
4 See my Ruskin and Hume section—Ruskin, the idealist, believes that
women should perform their ladyhood constantly. For him, such a
performance matched an inner reality. Hume, the skeptic, limited his notion
of the integrity of actions as the only sure representation of a “meaning”
subsequently or separately carried by words, to isolated acts.
5 Dinah is discussed in more detail in chapter two.
6 As such a misreader, Adam has some relation to Ruskin’s fancifully devoted
Knight in “Of Queens’ Gardens.” The point of the theoretic faculty is that it
does not recognize beauty “through” interpretation, but instead has an
“instinctive sense” of it. Although our understanding of its “moral meaning
comes from reflection” (4: 211), that meaning is, significantly, a secondary
process. For Ruskin such a distinction ensures that moral responses to beauty
are based on a God-given “sense” rather than on fallible thought processes.
This privileging of the one sense over the other throws some light on
Ruskin’s chivalrous knight’s otherwise inexplicable “blind service to its
lady” (18: 119), his “true faith and captivity” (18: 120) to her “even in
caprice,” since such devotion is based on “instinct,” a moral sense that
insures that “it is impossible for every one rightly trained—to love any one
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whose gentle counsel he cannot trust, or whose prayerful command he can
hesitate to obey”(18: 120). Just so should all men have faith in woman and in
his instincts about her. And just so is “Of Queens’ Gardens” an attempt to
make those men “rightly trained.” Although Eliot does not agree with
Ruskin’s conclusion—Adam Bede shows how very possible it is for a man to
love someone whom he should not trust—Adam’s mistaken “blind service”
does reinforce Ruskin’s belief in the moral sense. For it is actually not Hetty
he loves, but his conception of her—a conception that will not fail him.
7 When she changes from insect to human, she disappears from narrative. Her
purpose even at her most human is to humanize others.
8 Foreshadowing a similar point that Thomas Hardy will make with his
dairymaid, Tess.
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Works Cited
Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Hume, David. “Of the Standard of Taste.” Essays, Moral. Political, and
Literary. Ed. Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985.
226-249.
Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin. Ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander
Wedderbum. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
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Chapter Two
Beautiful Judges/Ideal Critics : Reading Sympathy in Hume, Ruskin,
and Eliot
In the first chapter beauty is known rather simply through its power
over the senses although some complexity does reside in how we name and
thus try to control its power. Eliot’s hero, Adam Bede, for example, is
presented as a rather “natural” connoisseur of aesthetic experience. Such a
rare untaught ability, however, offers little hope for a program of moral
education. But of course, neither beauty nor our experience of it is always so
simple. This chapter focuses on three representations of sense response
working together with the imagination to “read” the world. Each in its way is
an educational text: in explaining how the best of us judge beauty, Eliot,
Ruskin, and Hume are also teaching the rest us how to do so: how to choose,
purposefully, powerfully, and judiciously; how not to just “find” beauty in
the world (as if it existed there already) but to discover the capacity in the self
to connect, to choose, and to commit to beauty—to create a new (and
beautiful) form of reality.
Haunting these descriptions of the process of judgment, however, are
their standards of evaluation. In linking the beautiful to the good, standards
of beauty—by which we judge beauty and assess its quality—are invested
with moral weight. When employing standards to judge representations of
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beauty, the emphasis shifts from verisimilitude or experience to truth: the
goal becomes achieving the right response, the correct judgment. Each of the
following work offers its own troubling response to the desire to know the
“right” beauty and the way to reach it, troubling, especially, for the women
who are expected to embody their culture’s inner and outer aesthetic ideals.
David Hume’s Critic, John Ruskin’s Queen, and George Eliot’s Dinah
Morris appear in radically different texts: the Critic in an eighteenth-century
essay on taste written by a skeptic, the Queen in a nineteenth-century lecture
on women’s moral education written by a radical idealist, and, from the same
century, the saintly Dinah in a realist novel written by a skeptic with a taste
for idealist philosophy. The cosmopolitan man of taste, the idealized woman
of feeling, the female Methodist preacher—all three are engaged in a similar
practice, for all three are readers, readers who practice sympathetic
identification with those who are unlike them. Although identification for
each author is pursued for different ends, all three see it as a confrontation of
the terrifying distance between the self and the other, of an emptiness which
threatens social indifference and which is only bridgeable with the help of the
imagination. But for these authors, this identification is not merely an
intellectual understanding of the other or his circumstances. It is only the
body’s response to that imaginative work that can reach to the other side.
The details of those identifications, the practice of “entering into” the other
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described by each author, though they appear over a span of more than a
century, are strikingly similar. That connection between the aesthetic critic
Hume, bound by his engagement in enlightenment philosophy, and the realist
novelist, Eliot, bound by the demand to create a representation of the
mundane world that is at once faithfully mimetic and morally “improving,”
helps to explain why it is assumed that reading would be a moral good—why
reading, and reading novels especially, would lead to what George Eliot
called the “enlarg[ing] of men’s sympathies” (Letters 3: 111).
Both Ruskin and Eliot are engaged in the challenge of making feeling,
and especially women’s feeling, “real”—of giving those feelings the
authority to work in the world. This desire is a continuance of the previous
century’s grappling with the provenance and thus the authority of all feelings
and all judgments. John Locke’s notion of the human being as a tabula rasa1
amounts to a denial of innate ideas, and as such appeared to many as a denial
of morality itself—that most necessary of God-given knowledges. Locke
manages to hang on to the authority of our moral ideas only through a pretty
sleight-of-hand, situating these moral ideas in the realm of a divinely
provided Reason, a not altogether satisfactory (for many) resolution to the
ontological question.2 In the furious debates following Locke, his solution
became even more unpopular as reason became associated with the argument
for egoistic self-interest, reinforcing that distance between individuals (see
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Hobbes, etc.) Others argued for a morality based largely on other motives,
whether it be a pure and simple benevolence (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson) or a
more complex idea of such a “moral sense” (Hume, Smith) that would allow
moral perception to be as innate as sight, or hearing, or taste.3 Since
knowledge comes to us through our senses, then those senses also tell us
what is morally or aesthetically good: seeing the world, hearing the world,
touching the world will not only tells us what the world is, but also tells us
whether or not it is good. These philosophers believed the body’s responses
to be less vulnerable to interested manipulation of various kinds.
Reading Critically
Each line of thinking—that either reason or feeling could be the
authority, the foundation of judgment—is, of course, equally absurd to its
opponents. The difficulty in probing these subjects is the mystification they
have historically undergone in order to obscure that absurdity. Raymond
Williams decodes one version of that mystification in his analysis of the word
“criticism”:
What is at issue is not only the association between criticism and
fault-finding but the more basic association between criticism and
‘authoritative’ judgment as apparently general and natural processes.
As a term for the social or professional generalization of the processes
of reception of any but especially the more formal kinds of
communication (q.v.), criticism becomes ideological not only when it
assumes the position of the consumer but also when it masks this
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position by a succession of abstractions of its real terms of response
(as judgment, taste, cultivation, discrimination, sensibility;
disinterested, qualified, rigorous and so on). . . . The point would then
be, not to find some other term to replace it, while continuing the
same kind of activity, but to get rid of the habit, which depends,
fundamentally, on the abstraction of response from its real situation
and circumstances: the elevation to ‘ judgment,’ and to an a apparently
general process, when what always needs to be understood is the
specificity of the response, which is not an abstract “judgment” but
even where including, as often necessarily, positive or negative
responses, a definite practice, in active and complex relations with its
whole situation and context. (86)
Criticism carries both the sense of simple and perhaps capricious moral
judgment—“finding fault”—and the sense of engagement in a seemingly
more complex aesthetic endeavor—the “social or professional generalization
of the processes of reception of any but especially the more formal kinds of
communication.” The first meaning always haunts the second—as a
reminder that we don’t always trust individual judgment, that such judgment
may well be thought absurd. Williams’ definitions reveal a basic tension
between the comparative simplicity of empirical response and the complexity
of a specialized practice. Both conceptions of critical judgment carry
different kinds of authority, between which it may be convenient for a
theorist such as Hume to switch. But the second is always based upon the
first—the authority of an elite complex practice depends beneath its
“abstractions of its real terms of response” upon the bodies that give that
response. That body “consumes” the aesthetic work, as if responding to a
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work of art were as natural as enjoying the food before you, though it “masks
this position”—and that ease—through abstractions: special bodies,
privileged knowledge, strict standards of practice. Criticism is both “natural”
and practicable by an elite few.
In his essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume might be said to dwell
rather obsessively on the “situation and context” of the critical moment,
especially the difficulties of achieving that key abstract state, “disinterest.”
The essay defines the critic’s goal: to “rate the merits of a work exhibited to
his view and [to] assign its proper rank among the productions of genius”
(238). This task at first seems rather simple— viewing, rating, assigning
merits and rank, a completely visual and intellectual effort, with the
imagination at work at most to compare one work to remembered others in
order to achieve a ranking. According to Hume, however, defendable
“abstract ‘ judgment’” is not so easily arrived at: the critic “must preserve his
mind free from all prejudice and allow nothing to enter into his consideration,
but the very object which is submitted to his examination” (italics in original,
239). The key object for Hume, the most challenging text in this endeavor,
is that of the most admired other: the classical orator. The stumbling block to
appropriate objectivity in judging such a work is the reader’s historical bias:
A critic of a different age or nation, who should peruse this discourse,
must have all these circumstances in his eye, and must place himself
in the same situation as the audience, in order to form a true judgment
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78
of the oration.. . .1 must depart from this situation, and, considering
myself as a man in general, forget, if possible, my individual being,
and my peculiar circumstances. (239)
Incidentally corroborating Williams’s charge of “abstraction,” Hume
emphasizes self-forgetfulness as part of the process of focusing on the object.
The critic must consider himself as “man in general” rather than as an
“individual being” in “peculiar circumstances.” But this self-forgetfulness is
not entirely complete. The requirement that he become “man in general”
seems to presuppose some disinterested “purer” man waiting underneath the
distractions of self and culture.
But such “disinterest,” such “generality,” is not so empty or so
abstract, as it may at first seem. The “object” in question is not just the
physical text itself, but also the critic’s knowledge of the “point of view”
demanded by that art which “cannot be fully relished by persons, whose
situation, real or imaginary, is not conformable to that which is required by
the performance” (239). The critic is replacing one set of “special
circumstances” with another: the required “situation” is the scene, occasion,
or circumstance of the original “performance.” That judging which once
appeared to be a simple observation of the object, is really a complex
imagined experience o f it— requiring “a certain turn o f thought or
imagination to make us enter into all the opinions which then prevailed, and
relish the sentiments or conclusions derived from them” (246-7) in order to
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“hear” the performance of the oration as it should be heard—and here for
once the imagination functions as listening. The critic must know the object
and the situation demanded by the object, which includes knowledge of the
artist and his audience, and even perhaps their mutual awareness. Thus the
work of the imagination is to re-create that scene and participate in it as if
part of that audience, to somehow “enter into” the work’s historical and
cultural context. Thus the critic’s identification is not so much with the text’s
characters, as it will primarily be in theories of the novel, but with the
“situations” of the “performance” or with the audience at that performance.
He is to imagine the scene or context of the art and then judge it. Such a
practice is, of course, a specialized one: it is his exposure to culture that
equips him as judge, that gives him the tools that he must bring to the
scene—his experience with and knowledge of the particular object and his
ability for refined judgment based on that experience.
Hume troubles the idea that identification is a “general and natural”
process—indeed, “tasting” has never been so uncomfortable as in Hume’s
description. For Hume, identification with the “other” is difficult, especially
when it challenges our “natural” bodily moral sense. In these instances,
sympathetic identification is painful, and properly so: a “person influenced
by prejudice”
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. . . obstinately maintains his natural position, without placing himself
in that point of view which the performance supposes. If the work be
addressed to persons of a different age or nation, he makes no
allowance for their peculiar views and prejudices; but, full of the
manners of his own age and country, rashly condemns what seemed
admirable in the eyes of those for whom alone the discourse was
calculated. If the work be executed for the public, he never
sufficiently enlarges his comprehension, or forgets his interest as a
friend or enemy, as a rival or commentator. By this means his
sentiments are perverted; nor have the same beauties and blemishes
the same influence upon him, as if he had imposed a proper violence
upon his imagination, and had forgotten himself for a moment. (239-
40)
The text should have aesthetic, bodily, “influence” over its “reader” or
“listener”—that is what the critic is “judging” after all. The work of the
imagination is to “forget self’ and to think of others, to get to the “man in
general”—to get to that man’s body which can then knowledgably hear as
well as see that performance. This process of self-forgetfulness so necessary
for a pure moment of judgment, however, is “unnatural”—it is “natural” to
“obstinately” hold on to one’s biases and prejudices. The critic must be
suspicious of his natural reactions, must take care to ensure that he has
imposed that “proper violence” before he can reject a work with authority.4
Hume’s critic experiences very clear pain in several situations: one, the
biased disgust which is the result of prejudice and which should be
overcome; two, the informed disgust of the educated and properly
sympathetic reader which should be heeded; and three, the violence of
achieving that sympathy itself, which is a necessary element in the process.
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But we are left to question the validity of these categories and the
universality of moral principles or sentiments, to question the “man in
general.” The assurance of his own ability to measure the “propriety” of the
violence of identification, to know when his disgust is biased or not is
troubled by the fact that his is obviously a “modem” reader’s immediate
reaction to the manners of another age. The problem lies in the fact that the
body which experiences that biased disgust is the same one that is expected to
pass judgment on that bias itself: “a very violent effort is requisite to change
our judgment of manners, and excite sentiments of approbation or blame,
love or hatred, different from those to which the mind, from long custom, has
been familiarized.” Hume quickly retreats from the doubt such effort may
cast on the purity of the aesthetic response as a whole with the reassurance
that “where a man is confident of the rectitude of that moral standard by
which he judges, he is justly jealous of it, and will not pervert the sentiments
of his heart for a moment, in complaisance to any writer whatsoever” (247).
In the previous case, Hume admits that to “excite sentiments of approbation
or blame .. . different from those” we are familiar with is difficult, but
necessary; in this one, he assures us that a “confident” man will not do so if
such excitem ent would be a “perversion.” What organ of approbation or
blame is excited in the second case?
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The detailed length of Hume’s description of the “situation and
context” of aesthetic identification with a text by far outweighs the briefer
recounting of the most important moment, the actual judging of that text,
leaving it mysterious, yet perhaps more powerful for such cursory treatment.
Indeed, the key relation of judgment in the essay is the most ideological one.
“Entering into” what he reads seems to require that the critic match his
“judgments” and “sentiments” to those of the author, definitely an educated
relinquishing of the self, and one that suggests either that Hume is already
moving away from the paradigm of simple physical sensation or that he
assumes that man at this most basic level already comes equipped with the
ability to identify with even imagined others, as if “man in general” includes
the ability to understand “men in particular,” the authors of texts.5 Now we
see how aesthetic judgments, as may be expected when they are based upon
such identifications between persons and their sentiments, become moral
ones. For example, the question of identification, of almost bodily “entering
into” the feelings of others, takes on special significance when examining a
work from another age, a work which is more in danger of representing moral
values alien to our own:
But where the ideas of morality and decency alter from one age to
another, and where vicious manners are described, without being
marked with the proper characters of blame and disapprobation, this
must be allowed to disfigure the poem, and to be a real deformity. I
cannot, nor is it proper I should, enter into such sentiments; and
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however I may excuse the poet, on account of the manners of his age,
I can never relish the composition... .We are not interested in the
fortunes and sentiments of such rough heroes; we are displeased to
find the limits of vice and virtue so much confounded; and whatever
indulgence we may give to the writer on account of his prejudices, we
cannot prevail on ourselves to enter into his sentiments, or bear an
affection to characters which we plainly discover to be blamable.
(246)
This major moment of judgment in the essay is one when identification
fails—the one moment where we actually see the judgment taking place is an
unquestioned, defensive call to the body’s moral authority. Hume conflates
moral and aesthetic judgment: a moral flaw, to him, is clearly an aesthetic
one. To “enter into [the author’s] sentiments, or bear affection to characters
which we plainly discover to be blamable,” is not so intellectual an endeavor
as identifying with his ideas or his perspective may have seemed. In fact,
that identification is not with concepts, but with “sentiments”—with the
author’s feelings about things. This is the danger of reading, to
Hume: such literature could corrupt our feelings, the very basis of our
judgment. It is interesting that his refusal to feel here is kept safely
intellectual: he is “not interested” or “displeased” and can only “excuse the
poet, on account of the manners of his age” or even “indulge” him “on
account of his prejudices”; but he “cannot relish the composition”—he
cannot find sensual pleasure in it, for to do so would be to betray the
malfunctioning of his moral sense.
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Reading Sympathetically
Both the “modem” practice of criticism and the novel’s sympathetic
project, which argues that feeling between individuals is the basis of a
humane civil society, shift the focus from abstracted or intellectual
knowledge about others to an experience of them through the imagination—
sympathy is less a matter of telling and responding to facts or stories of
others, than of seeing and feeling moments in those stories, of imaginatively
embodying those facts. The authority of the resulting moral judgment, the
authority of sympathy itself, lies in those feelings, in the observer’s body.
While such sympathetic experience is often “elevated to judgment” in a
simple, unquestioning way, John Ruskin and George Eliot cast it as
something more like Williams’s “definitive practice.” Perhaps because the
authority of the body, especially the feminine body, in the mid-nineteenth
century has become such a doubtful thing, both writers in their endeavor to
make sympathy a “real” force in the world carefully build stringent
requirements into the scene of imaginative identification—so much so that
the principal sense, vision, becomes something that is not really vision at all.
As with Hume, these requirements cast sympathy as labor in an attempt to
make the individual’s responses less “abstract”—to reverse the “abstraction
of response from its real situation and circumstances.” They are trying to
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85
fortify sympathy by returning it to its roots in the body and by making clear
the work necessary to its practice.
Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens” lays out an educational program for
girls which is intended to train them to be powerfully sympathetic women.
Key to that education is the girl’s reading practice, which like Hume’s
aesthetic criticism is based upon “entering into” some component of the text.
For Ruskin as for Hume, to read well is to identify with the other, whether
that goal is to judge or to sympathize with that other. That reading is at the
heart of both aesthetic criticism and sympathetic experience. By Ruskin’s
time, “man in general” has become “economic man,” a being driven by
competition and the need to assert his own individual worth in the brutal
business of life—in other words, a being incapable of practicing sympathetic
understanding of others.6 Economic man’s moral and emotional deficit,
however, are counterbalanced by the “angel in the house”: it is woman who
really possesses these softer abilities; the capabilities of each sex can then be
easily valued as entirely proper to their “separate spheres” of activity. Thus,
we can see why in “Of Queens’ Gardens,” Ruskin sets young girls in
opposition to the male historians who, in Hume’s terms, might have been
expected to play the critical role. As Ruskin imagines his Queen’s training in
aesthetic judgment,
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She should be taught to enter with her whole personality into the
history she reads; to picture the passages of it vitally in her own bright
imagination; to apprehend, with her fine instincts, the pathetic
circumstances and dramatic relations, which the historian too often
only eclipses by his reasoning, and disconnects by his arrangement: it
is for her to trace the hidden equities of divine reward, and catch
sight, through the darkness, of the fateful threads of woven fire that
connect error with retribution. (18: 126)
In her preparation to become a Queen, Ruskin’s girl, like Hume’s critic is to
practice something that is not quite forgetfulness—a partial clearing away of
the personal in order to achieve an intense focus on the object, “the history
she reads,” and the re-creation of it in her imagination. This “entering into”
what she is reading, Ruskin implies, is practice for her future moral
assessment of society. The historian in comparison is pre-occupied with self:
“his reasons” and “his arrangements” involve cognitive activities that obscure
any initial “sensational” response. The girl, forgetting her “individual being
and peculiar circumstances,” can “trace” “arrangements” that already exist in
the text (those “fateful threads of woven fire”), and can focus so intently on
that text that she can observe even those details that are usually obscured by
“the darkness” of self and society. Such reading is not necessarily a response
to the narrative of “history,” but to other, more obscure “relations.” This
version of letting go of the self which still leaves the “whole personality”
active implies an essential humanity similar to Hume’s “man in general,” a
level of humanity that the career-oriented historian either cannot achieve
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based on the power of his “peculiar circumstances” or does not possess at all
because it has become essentially feminine.7
A problem appears as soon as Ruskin moves the girl from
sympathetic identification with the text to detailing what she will find within
it. “Entering into,” “picturing,” and “apprehending” all seem of a piece with
understanding through visualization and imagined experience. But this sense
of felt connection with the imagined scene is disturbed by Ruskin’s directive
that she “trace the hidden equities of divine reward” and “catch sight of the . .
. threads . . . that connect error with retribution.” This language is suggestive
more of measuring isolated pieces of her “picture” than of “apprehending”
the whole of it—as if she were using a scale or drawing a map instead of
responding with “her fine instincts.” Such activities recall that fatal flaw of
the historian who not only eclipses the “picture” of history, but also
disconnects that picture from its effect upon his body, from his moral sense
Such a suspicion rests upon the assumption that these equities and
threads exist in the “picture,” in the history itself, or in her imagined vision of
it. But what if they were instead detectable in her responses to those pictures,
were in fact those responses themselves? The fact that the equities she is to
trace are those of “divine reward” supports such a reading. Surely this
“divine” message is not present in the “history she reads”—a history written
by historians. Equally unlikely is the possibility that her imagination is
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88
producing divine truth—that would be to award that imagination powers
equivalent to God’s. But, if the “fateful threads of woven fire” are the
immediate, nervous responses in her own body to such texts, then the divinity
lies within her body, which is a creation of God, not a tool of her own will.
Those fiery threads, then, are the burning of her own nerves. She cannot
speak for God, or see as He does, but she can “apprehend” the world and
various representations of it with the faculties that God has given her.
Ruskin’s divine equities and fateful threads figure forth the moral sense itself:
they are metaphors for the body’s pleasure and pain at the recognition of
good and evil. Although her object is nominally history, what she responds
to is different from the text she literally “reads” on the page, for the
“passages” in her imagined version of history are complexly embedded with
relations which she can analogically sense in ways other than the simply
visual. It is truly her body which is responding to this text (not man in
general); it is her “vision” (which she needs to practice). Her history is
better than the history of books because she sees it and feels it at once—she
becomes that history as she recreates it in her imagination, as her body
becomes permeated with it.
The moment when Hume declares that a work is “deformed” because
he cannot sympathize with the author, audience, or scene persists in
nineteenth-century criticism though it exists within an entirely shifted
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tradition: a critic may still declare that a novel is not good because she cannot
sympathize with its characters, but she would understand that judgment
differently because the purpose of the work has become very different.
Identification has come to play a radically different role. For Hume,
sympathy was one sign among others of a work’s aesthetic quality. For this
later audience, sympathy is the work’s main mission.
Both Hume’s and Ruskin’s models operate on the basis of
sympathetic identification, but the object of that identification is clearly not
the actual world. For Hume, the ideal reader imagines or “enters into” the
sentiments of the ideal spectator of a scene. For Ruskin, the girl recreates in
her imagination the history she reads, entering into or identifying with the
consequences of such scenes every day. Such sympathy is primarily centered
upon the self: moral judgment demands a sensitive moral sense and an inner
eye that can create and read moral visions. In Adam Bede a novel that
grounds a study of moral action in the detail of the everyday lives of village
carpenters, farmer’s nieces, and the very minor gentry, Eliot’s depiction of
the factory girl and lay preacher, Dinah Morris, articulates the empiricists’
unspoken article of faith—that the imagination is not a substitute for seeing
the world, but is an aid to such seeing. Eliot makes clear what Hume and
Ruskin leave implicit: what all three readers are “reading” are the products of
the imagination. In the endeavor to make moral response “real,” she makes it
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90
clear that the object under observation, the object which inspires the
response, is not objective or material “reality”—or at least, is not simply so.
The world of sympathy is a complex mix of the actual and the imagined—a
mix that allows for the bridging of the distance between isolated, empirical
individuals.
At first Dinah Morris, that almost unbelievably good young woman
who both preaches and ministers to the needy, seems similar to Ruskin’s girl
reader who interprets her own responses more than she does the world itself.
Dinah’s eyes are definitely not “keen” like Adam’s or Mrs Poyser’s. In fact,
she is introduced as rather oblivious to immediate surroundings. In her
introductory scene, a passing spectator observes of her preaching to a rural
crowd that “there was no keenness in [her] eyes; they seemed rather to be
shedding love than making observations,” a trait which associates Dinah
Q
immediately with Ruskin’s conception of woman as “love visable” rather
than with either his or Hume’s active critics. Her activities seem to be the
opposite to those of any spectator: she is not making observations but
projecting love. This impression of blindness, however, is contradicted by
her “liquid look which tells that the mind is full of what it has to give out,
rather than impressed by external objects” (67). Like Ruskin’s girl, her
internal activities echo those of a critical observer quite well: her mind is
“full,” but instead of “external objects” she is impressed by what her “mind ..
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. has to give out.” Her attention is on inner rather than external vision. She
may not be conscious of her “self,” but, like the critic, she is paying attention
to her own feelings.
But Eliot makes clear that it is not only her self that Dinah is reading.
Dinah’s visions are neither a simple practice exercise (like those of Ruskin’s
girls) nor a recreation of historical occasions (like that of Hume’s critic), but
instead are a kind of heightened reality achieved through imagination.9 Both
the critic and the girl respond to objects they recreate based upon the words
they find in texts. In contrast, Dinah calls “actual” people to her imagination,
allowing her the continuance of sympathy when those who win her concern,
those whom she already knows and has already seen, are out of physical
contact. In her letter to Seth, she reports her recreation of her emotional
connection with his mother: “tell her I often bear her in my thoughts at
evening time, when I am sitting in the dim light as I did with her, and we held
one another’s hands, and I spoke the words of comfort that were given to me”
(373). She experiences the world first, and then recreates it in her
imagination as memory. Such a practice is a comfort to herself and a
message of comfort to Lisbeth and Seth when she tells them that those
connected in this way “bear one another about in their thoughts continually,
as it were a new strength” (375). For Dinah, imagination is not just a
distanced picturing of but a subjective connecting to the world and the people
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in it. She is a figure in her imagined scene, but she is present as herself, not
as an “objective” critic or even as the more involved girl reader. But perhaps
the most important function of her imagination is that it improves the clarity
of sympathetic vision itself. For example, she reports a
strange thing—sometimes when I’m quite alone, sitting in my room
with my eyes closed, or walking over the hills, the people I’ve seen
and known, if it’s only been for a few days, are brought before me,
and I hear their voices and see them look and move, almost plainer
than I ever did when they were really with me so as I could touch
them. (187)
Here imaginative sight is clearer than actual sight. Her imagination is a
bodily one, making connections of hearing and touch as well as sight between
herself and the world. The world is recreated for all her senses—she is
responding to it as if it were real. Indeed, such connection can only happen
in the imagination: the “reality” of interpersonal feeling is that we must so
construct it.
Given the completeness of her bodily involvement in her imagination,
Dinah reveals the centrality of pain to the project of sympathy. For Hume, as
we have seen, when the “world” in question is painful to the observer, the
relation of the critic to that world or the objects in it is a distanced one: the
painful response is an indication of how well the identification is going or of
how effective the object is. For Ruskin, the painful response is the Queen’s
goal, though he does not clarify how that sympathetic identification with
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93
sufferers will actually be translated into the social action or change he so
clearly expects. Also, neither Ruskin nor Hume discriminate between seeing
an imagined scene and seeing something in the “real” world—or, if there are
hints of such a distinction, girls practicing with books versus Queens really
seeing the world—then the imagined seeing is related quite closely to simple
sight. Eliot presents the more complex possibility of a world of people who,
through the imagination, are permeated by the feelings of others and who
operate on desires based upon such shared experience.
Dinah’s imagination is so strong that in entering into some scenes, her
pain becomes too much for her to bear, so that she must find relief from it in
action—which is, in part, relief from her own pain. Social action is
motivated by imaginatively shared pain. If the original of the imagined
object is close at hand, she can find that relief in some sort of action: giving
advice or warning; offering help or love. For example, in the scene
contrasting Dinah and Hetty in their bedrooms, Eliot explicitly links
imagination, the feeling it produces, and the compelling need to respond, in
the world, to that feeling. While readying herself for bed, Dinah’s thoughts
turn to Hetty’s character, “bent merely on little foolish, selfish pleasures, like
a child hugging its toys in the beginning of a long toilsome journey,” and to
her probable future, “in which it will have to bear hunger and cold and
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unsheltered darkness.” As the scene becomes more detailed, her feeling
becomes more urgent:
this feeling about Hetty had gathered a painful intensity; her
imagination had created a thorny thicket of sin and sorrow, in which
she saw the poor thing struggling tom and bleeding, looking with
tears for rescue and finding none. It was in this way that Dinah’s
imagination and sympathy acted and reacted habitually, each
heightening the other. She felt a deep longing to go now and pour into
Hetty’s ear all the words of tender warning and appeal that rushed
into her mind. (203)
Dinah not only sees Hetty’s suffering but feels it with “a painful intensity.”
Her imagination and her sympathy feed each other in a potentially endless
cycle until the physical pressure of the pathetic picture of Hetty and the pity
and sorrow that it inspires force Dinah to action, in this instance, to the giving
of an unheeded warning. Dinah’s pain ties self and world together in a “deep
longing” to bridge the distance between them, to make contact, whether
through words or touch. The deep longing is a desire for action, for relief of
their mutual pain, but it is also a desire to make the felt connection a real one,
one that exists in the world that holds more than just her own mind and body.
Dinah’s connection to the world and the others in it has the potential to be a
permanent link, a link forged by the imagination and the physical responses it
inspires. The picture of sympathy devised by Eliot here does not envision
sympathetic identification as isolated acts that exist in order for isolated
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judgments of self or others to take place, but rather for a continuous
knowledge of, and response to, those others.
Reading the world, connecting to it in this way is dangerous: it makes
Dinah vulnerable, both to her senses and to her imagination. In the scene
where Dinah “delight[s] in her bedroom window,” we again see that her
imagination enhances the physical scene:
Her heart was very full, for there was to be only one more night on
which she would look out on those fields for a long time to come; but
she thought little of leaving the mere scene, for to her, bleak
Snowfield had just as many charms: she thought of all the dear people
whom she had learned to care for among these peaceful fields, and
who would now have a place in her loving remembrance for ever.
She thought of the struggles and the weariness that might lie before
them in the rest of their life’s journey, when she would be away from
them and know nothing of what was befalling them; and the pressure
of this thought soon became too strong for her to enjoy the
unresponding stillness of the moonlit fields.
She associates loved ones with the sight of the fields, and “struggles and
weariness” with those loved ones. She makes connections into future, across
time. She is practicing that Queenly duty of “feeling the ills of the world” as
Ruskin would have it done. However, the objects of her concern are not
available either physically or temporally: she is imagining future suffering,
leaving her to bear the pain alone without recourse to any action in the actual
world. The pain of this impasse, the specter of which haunts all defenders of
sympathy, leads her to close
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her eyes, that she might feel more intensely the presence of a Love
and Sympathy deeper and more tender than was breathed from earth
and sky. That was often Dinah’s mode of praying in solitude. Simply
to close her eyes, and to feel herself enclosed by the Divine Presence.
(202)
This religious response is so real to Dinah because it is so physical; she uses
her imagination both for her work and for her relief from it. This feeling,
though, signals a danger: all here in this scene is imagination, both
experiencing pain and the relief from it. Dinah could potentially get lost in
the very likeness of her imagined world to the real one about which she is so
concerned.
This danger, though, is one that is not realized in Dinah’s story; the
world itself mediates the power of the imagination. In contrast to Ruskin,
who idealizes his figure of virtue, Eliot allows her connoisseur of sympathy
to have a history of failure as well as of success. As Dinah earns her
experience not just in her imagination, but in the world as well, such
“practice” offers a useful check on the idealism of the imagination. As she is
“warning” Hetty in the bedroom scene against the future she has just
imagined for her, she continues to keep her attention upon her: “she saw the
effect” of her words and “her tender anxious pleading became the more
earnest, till Hetty, full of a vague fear that something evil was sometime to
befall her, began to cry.” Dinah proceeds to misinterpret those tears:
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Dinah had never seen Hetty affected in this way before, and with her
usual benignant hopefulness, she trusted it was the stirring of a divine
impulse. She kissed the sobbing thing, and began to cry with her for
grateful joy.
Here she mistakes tears for “a divine impulse” and physical touch for
emotional communion. Immediately after they separate, Dinah is consumed
by her “passionate pity” while Hetty “was soon in the wood again” dreaming
of her lover. Eliot uses this scene as an illustration of the learned nature of
sympathy:
It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never understand
the higher, the higher nature commands a complex view of the lower.
But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we
learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience, often with
bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up by the wrong end, and
fancying our space wider than it is. (205-6).
Eliot compares this kind of social comprehension to another kind of vision
that most understand to be “natural” as well—we must learn how to process
what our eyes see, how to interpret the surfaces that we see into weight and
sharpness and space. Even those with the clearest of visions must experiment
and practice with it as a tool, just like Hume’s Critic or those of “higher”
nature in search of “a complex view of the lower.” As young seers must
adjust their early vision to real objects and spaces, so must those of “higher
nature” be constrained by the lower. Dinah is used to imagined bodies, but
they can never take precedence over the real ones. In mistaking Hetty’s
“vague fear” for a “divine impulse” she is “taking things up by the wrong
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end.” Eliot’s point is that Dinah must not learn just to make her imagination
better, but to hold it in check, as sight is by the dumb objects of the world.
All three readers, Hume’s critic, Ruskin’s girl, and Eliot’s Dinah, see
not with the physical eye, but with whatever “sees” the creations of the
imagination. Attempting to explain or anchor moral feeling in the Real, in
the body, fails, if we demand that its response be tied to objective reality. Or,
we may say that it becomes more complex—it exposes the fragility of those
categories (the real, the body, experience). We can feel certain that our
bodies are real, and the experiences of those bodies. The body lends the
products of the imagination its realism through its response to them.
Ruskin’s girl readers re-envision the stories their history tells them,
responding to the imagined scenes rather than any “actual” history or
persons. Where Hume’s critic “enters into” the mind of a “general” spectator
of the scene, Ruskin’s girl enters into the scene itself—feeling the emotions
of the characters and the moral implications of the situations she “sees” as
she creates them for herself. Hume’s critic identifies with the “best” possible
spectator of a work. Ruskin’s girl identifies with the sufferings of the
characters in such a work itself and with the moral canvas upon which that
drama takes place. The girl’s role as spectator is a very tenuous thing—she is
valuable not for her distance, her objectivity in the traditional “critical” sense,
but in her selfless ability to become one with those she would judge. Eliot’s
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Dinah more explicitly reads her imagination. Her moments of greatest
sympathy occur as retrospection, or as vision amplified through that
imagination (in order to really respond to it) and thus perilously, though
usefully, “mistaken.” All three readers are performing a sympathetic
identification, though they identify with different actors in what are at least
partially imagined scenes. Or they are identifying with the scene, the work of
the imagination itself and entirely. Indeed, everyone wants vision, everyone
wants the transparent authority of physical sight; but nobody believes it
happens through the eyes. But that does not have to be a danger to the
sympathetic project: vision can stand as metaphor for the other senses, ones
less strictly associated with “objective” judgment. What the body “sees” is a
much more personal thing, a much more intimate knowledge. And such a
knowledge may be what sympathetic identification, what sympathy itself
demands.
The Consequences of Reading
It is difficult to evaluate Eliot’s sympathetic project. Since we can see
both skepticism and idealism in her work, it is useful to situate her between
extremes, between the most stringent skeptic (Hume) and, as he is so often
called, the most naive idealist (Ruskin). An examination of the consequences
of their various beliefs in the individual body can provide a partial answer to
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whether their authorizing of moral judgment in bodily response is, in the end,
productive. Early in his essay Hume explains all the “specialized”
requirements necessary for the critic to perform as the ideal, perfect empirical
machine, a description that foreshadows the failure of such an endeavor:
Those finer emotions of the mind are of a very tender and delicate
nature, and require the concurrence of many favorable circumstances
to make them play with facility and exactness, according to their
general and established principles. The least exterior hinderance to
such small springs, or the least internal disorder, disturbs their motion,
and confounds the operations of the whole machine. When we would
make an experiment of this nature, and would try the force of any
beauty or deformity, we must choose with care a proper time and
place, and bring the fancy to a suitable situation and disposition. A
perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to
the object; if any of these circumstances be wanting, our experiment
will be fallacious, and we shall be unable to judge of the catholic and
universal beauty. (232-3)
Man is not such a machine: these conditions are too stringent and men’s
abilities too unreliable, and so the judgment of the “relation, which nature has
placed between the form and the sentiment,” that relation which Hume has
been attempting to build a standard upon, “will at least be more obscure.”
The critic will have to turn to other evidence in addition to the judgment of
his senses, evidence that offers the hope of “greater accuracy” in approaching
a standard. Thus, Hume turns away from the isolated, individual moment of
judgment:
We shall be able to ascertain its influence, not so much from the
operation of each particular beauty, as from the durable admiration
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which attends those works that have survived all the caprices of mode
and fashion, all the mistakes of ignorance and envy. (233)
Since one moment of judgment, one “operation” of beauty, is so impossible
to read or assess itself, the “standard” of taste must come through the
“durable admiration” that relays the agreement of many such judgments,
judgments from a confusion of times and places and understandings, where
the biases of many fallible moments and bodies may cancel each other out.
For Hume, the critic has become not simply a reader of art, but a consumer
and compiler of history. Hume’s actual critic is just that historian whom
Ruskin warns against.
Hume’s ideal critic turns out to be a rhetorical straw man, a fantasy
whose requirements prove the treachery of that particular mode of inquiry.
Ruskin’s Queen, in contrast, to be effective at all, must never be admitted to
be fantasy. Where Hume rejects the experiment for its impossibility, Ruskin,
using the structure of separate spheres, can create instead a world where the
conditions for the Humean experiment and the subject of that experiment are
always perfectly controlled:
By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and
temptation. The man, in his rough work in open world, must
encounter all peril and trial;—to him, therefore, must be the failure,
the offence, the inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or
subdued; often misled; and always hardened. But he guards the
woman from this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself
has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error
or offence. This is the true nature of home—it is the place of Peace;
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the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and
division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home. . . .But so far as it is
a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by
Household Gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom
they can receive with love. .. .so far it vindicates the name, and fulfils
the praise, of Home. (18: 122)
This passage has inspired much derision—it is melodramatic, sentimental,
and sexist. But the very elements that make it so useful as an example of
patriarchal extremity become more complex when considered in terms of
Hume’s experiment. This construction of Home constantly reinforces
Hume’s experimental conditions and the experimental moment. The
domestic sphere nurtures sensibility, protecting it not only from “injury” but
also from the interests or biases that the larger world introduces.
If individual judgment is too unreliable in the material world, then a
perfect world like Ruskin’s Home or Garden must be created for it. But this
perfect world has demands of its own for the sex chosen to live within it,
demands that reveal the almost sadistic consequences of restricting moral
response to women. For Ruskin’s Home not only allows for the experiment,
it demands it—continuously. His insistence on woman’s infallibility and on
the necessary inviolability of her sphere echoes Hume’s unachievable
standards for the ideal critic. Hume’s conception of “delicacy of taste” is
similarly rigorous: “where the organs are so fine as to allow nothing to escape
them, and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the
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composition” (235). Ruskin’s Queens, whose authority is based on just such
delicacy, must also “allow nothing to escape them,” must in Ruskin’s terms
and with this concession, “as far as one can use such terms of a human
creature—be incapable of error. So far as she rules, all must be right, or
nothing is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good, instinctively,
infallibly wise” (18: 123).
In contrast to Hume’s awareness of the difficulties of sympathetic
identification, Ruskin naturalizes the artificiality of the critical state. As is to
be expected from the creator of the “Home,” Ruskin rejects the idea that the
process of identification could be painful or demand any “violence” upon the
integrity of the self. Ruskin does not allow that woman’s bias may be
“natural” in the neutral way that Hume does. For a proper woman, for a
Queen, the disposition of the judge is “natural” to her because it is more than
her duty: it is her character. If she has any biases at all, in the process of
becoming Ruskin’s equivalent of the “objective” or “general” critic, her
letting go of the personal will leave her with only the proper biases which
favor the good of all. But more frequently, she seems to always be that man,
or woman, “in general.” This disposition defines her sex. Ruskin’s essay
must work, then, to persuade its audience that this state is natural (and that
they must ensure that it remains natural). Such work (within the text and
without) does produce something rather like the “hothouse” which Kate
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Millet deemed the domestic sphere. Indeed, Hume’s logic would seem to
foreshadow Millett’s point, for to “impose a proper violence upon [the]
imagination,” is rather like forcing sensitive blooms out of season. Where
Hume acknowledges the violence of this “unnatural” activity, Ruskin would
make it permanent: “and whether consciously or not, you must be, in many a
heart, enthroned: there is no putting by that crown; queens you must always
be: queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons; queens of
higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and will forever bow,
before the myrtle crown and the stainless sceptre of womanhood” (18: 139).
Even more telling is the key difference between the goals of each
endeavor: the Man of Taste is in search of Beauty, of the pleasure that will
set his “standard”; the Queen is in search of suffering, of pain. For the critic,
once the violence of becoming “man in general” has properly occurred, the
simple pleasure/pain of judgment can take place. At that point, if he
experiences more pain, he can safely, even dutifully, disengage, perhaps with
the added pleasure of indulgence or disdain. The text which produces
pleasure may be returned to, both for its original attractions and for the
pleasure of confirming one’s taste. But where the critic is looking for
pleasure, the Queen is compelled to search for pain:
There is no suffering, no injustice, no misery in the earth, but the guilt
of it lies with you . . . It is only you who can feel the depths of pain,
and conceive the way of its healing. (18: 140)
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Because she can feel it, she must feel it. Her body may be safe within the
confines of the Home, but her sensuous mind must experience the world’s
suffering. For the Queen, the “proper violence” is a double violence. She
experiences her own pain in making the identification, in “forcing herself to
feel” continually, in the losing of herself which is “imposing” that “proper
violence” on herself.. And that violence is then magnified by the requirement
that she impose that violence on herself in order to experience vicariously the
violence imposed upon others.
In this particular attempt to authorize the body’s judgment of the
world, Ruskin imposes an excruciating and inescapable responsibility on
women. In Hume’s experiment, “we must choose with care a proper time
and place, and bring the fancy to a suitable situation and disposition. A
perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the
object” (8). In Ruskin, situation and disposition collapse:
And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. The
stars only may be over her head; the glowworm in the night-cold
grass may be the only fire at her foot; but home is yet wherever she is;
and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled
with cedar, or painted with vermilian, shedding its quiet light far, for
those who else were homeless. (18: 122-3)
In her perfection as judgmental subject she embodies the experiment itself. It
is in her nature, enforced by the intent and protection of her training, always
to be focused on others, never to be influenced by self, always to be forming
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judgments—to carry the scene and the tools of the experiment with her
“wherever” she goes. Hume’s fantasy of a successful “controlled”
experiment is mirrored in Ruskin’s attempt to control his subject and her
condition. The “home” in which the angel resides (or the Queen’s garden) is
thus a laboratory that carries on a precarious (and, if Hume’s logic is correct,
ultimately doomed) social experiment, one that attempts to transfer the
violence acted out on the bodies of the world’s vulnerable onto the minds of
the world’s most “protected.”
The consequence of Hume’s skepticism is an authority that is diffused
across time: the individual body is still authoritative but only in its agreement
with many other bodies. The consequence of Ruskin’s idealism is a
questionable concentration of authority in the individual body: the demand
that each body carry the weight of all judgment. Eliot avoids both extremes
by representing Dinah’s more complex relationship to her own authority.
The specter of passivity troubles the basic empirical model of judgment,
which calls for the judge to lose his or herself in the complete focus upon the
object to be judged, allowing for the violence of identification. Dinah takes
such a rejection of authority a step further by coding her loss of self as not
her choice, but as a call from a force beyond herself. We primarily learn
about her responses to the world as Dinah herself reads them. She interprets
her empirical responses through a socially-accepted religious code: she
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consistently refers to her body as the medium of God’s message. In
describing her preaching to Hayslope’s rector, Mr. Irwine, she figures herself
as the ultimate instrument: “but sometimes it seemed as if speech came to me
without any will of my own, and words were given to me that came out as the
tears come, because our hearts are full and we can’t help it” (135). She casts
herself as passive in her preaching: her words are like tears, that flow from
her body without her will, due to her overwhelming feelings and to the God
who has put them there. Thus, like Hume’s critic, her forgetting herself is in
service of a complete identification with something else: “I seem to have no
room in my soul for wants and fears of my own, it has pleased God to fill my
heart so full with the wants and sufferings of his poor people” (80). Although
in her full concentration on her task she echoes the critic in his moment of
judgment, she presents herself not as an impartial observer who consciously
leaves “no room” for self, but as a vessel which is filled instead at God’s
desire. In contrast to that critic and even to Ruskin’s Queen, Dinah does not
perform sympathy but has it given to her, both in the objects she sees and the
feelings they inspire. She removes her “self’ from the process both in her
representation of it to the rector and in her own understanding of it. Thus her
authority as critic resides not in her own feelings, but in God’s which come
through her. It seems that only through disavowing her authority can she use
its power.
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But Eliot also represents such an obscuring of Dinah’s power as a
relief from the “depths of pain” which in Ruskin’s terms should be her
primary focus. When alone, Dinah practices the imaginative forgetting of
self that seems to echo Ruskin’s recommended exercise for young girl who
should enter “with her whole personality into the history she reads” in order
“to trace the hidden equities of divine reward, and catch sight, through the
darkness, of the fateful threads of woven fire that connect error with
retribution” (18: 126). However, Dinah figures her practice not only as an
exercise in human moral judgment but also at times as an escape to a
“higher” form of judgment:
for when I’m not greatly wrought upon, I’m too much given to sit
silent all day long with the thought of God overflowing my soul—as
the pebbles lie bathed in the Willow Brook. For thoughts are so
great—aren’t they, sir? They seem to lie upon us like a deep flood;
and it’s my besetment to forget where I am and everything about me,
and lose myself in thoughts that I could give no account of, for I could
neither make a beginning nor ending of them in words. (135)
Unlike Hume’s diffusion of authority across the many bodies which populate
history, Eliot imagines a more limited shift from Dinah to God—which can
also be read as a diffusion into a moral whole rather than into an
indeterminate series. This scene is figured somewhat differently than
Ruskin’s, however. First, her attention at this moment is not on the suffering
of the world, but upon the “thought of God.” Eliot allows Dinah, like
Hume’s critic, to focus on that which gives her some sort of pleasure, some
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cleansing, or at least some change from being “wrought upon.” Second, her
attention is so much on “thoughts” that she “loses self,” but that loss is to
such an extent that words are not adequate to describe what she feels or what
her thoughts are. Dinah, or Eliot, does not have Ruskin’s confidence in the
ability to clarify (to trace the threads of) whatever is in her mind, or even
what her own response might be, though they share a sense of its power. But
for Dinah this power is different from the power of judgment that she tends to
disclaim: divine power, a comforting as well as a demanding one. Eliot
allows Dinah access to that kind of power; unlike Ruskin, whose girls and
women are warned away from thinking about God, or religion, Eliot does not
fear that such activity will either go to Dinah’s head or convince other
women that, given Dinah’s effort, they can avoid doing their own share. Her
imagination is “so great” that her corresponding “loss” of self is less
controlled, more total, and potentially more significant than either Hume or
Ruskin envision. Eliot figures Dinah’s body as not limited by her physical
form, but as somehow encompassing or being encompassed by a more divine
presence. This power refigures the “problem” of selflessness not simply as a
refusal of agency but as a reliance on a greater one. Even if Eliot herself is
skeptical about such power, Dinah’s belief in it helps her to avoid both the
pressures of that guilt that Ruskin will later so heap upon the whole sex and
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the refusal of decision or the responsibility for such decision that Hume
leaves with his readers.
All three readers—the critic, the girl, Dinah—may be read as
participating in a practice similar to what Raymond Williams’s defines as
criticism: “a definitive practice, in active and complex relations with its
whole situation and context.” All three writers—Hume, Ruskin, Eliot—
participate in the conflicting desires to claim and to refuse the authority of the
body. Although the three authors at times may seem to rely upon the
“abstraction of response from its real situation and circumstances” they also
participate in the w«-masking of the critical position, in the attempt to make
concrete, specific, and situated what are too often abstract terms, especially,
“judgment, taste, discrimination, sensibility; disinterested, qualified, rigorous,
and so on.” At times, these three writers try to avoid the dangers of an
unrecognized “practice” by making their ideology clear. All three mean
these terms in moral ways, mean them to be understood as social forces.
They lay their biases, their prejudices bare to our eyes. At other times,
“situation and context” become suddenly obscure: Hume’s confusion
between a reliance upon a malleable moral sense and a defense of its
integrity; the erasure of the connection of the sympathetic project to formal
aesthetics, though not the relation between moral and aesthetic feeling—in
which both Ruskin and Eliot believe. It is left to us to “judge” them, if we
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can devise a conscious practice within which to do so—if we can find a
position with which to identify.
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Notes
1 See Locke, Book One.
2 See, for example, his discussion “Of Judgment” (Locke 370-1).
3 See Landow who terms Thomas Burnet, Athony Cooper, and Lord
Shaftsbury “the emotionalist school of moral philosophy” (152).
4 For us, reading this reader of feeling through our own biases, it is clear that
question of how one can tell whether or not one has left prejudice behind
opens the door for unrecognized biases, such as class, to operate. Even this
warning, as well as the directive to judge as “man in general,” leaves plenty
of room for the rejection of the other. Perhaps the underlying binary of
approval and rejection is the source of the problem—the search for an
ultimate decision rules out more complicated forms of understanding.
5 Yet more support for Hume’s skepticism, though not one that he articulates
or even appears to suspect himself.
6 This phrase comes to me from Gagnier’s discussion of Ruskin’s Unto This
Last. The phrase is not Ruskin’s; however, the editors of the Library Edition
use it twice in their introduction to the volume which contains that particular
work (7: lxxxiii, ciii).
7 This last reading may work with the rhetoric of strict gender differentiation
of “Of Queens’ Gardens,” but is contradicted by the exquisite humanity of
male genius—the artist, and perhaps even the critic—as seen in Ruskin’s
Modem Painters.
8 From “Of Queens’ Gardens” (18: 128).
9 Such may also be implied of Ruskin’s Queen, though beyond the demand
“to feel the depths of pain and conceive the way of its healing” he does not
enlighten us further about the adult woman’s reading practices.
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Works Cited
Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Penguin, 1985.
—. Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. 9 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1954-78.
Gagnier, Regenia. “A Critique of Practical Aesthetics.” Aesthetics and
Ideology. Ed. George Levine. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994.
Hume, David. “Of the Standard of Taste.” Essays. Moral. Political, and
Literary. Ed. Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985.
226-249.
Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Maurice
Cranston London: Collier Books, 1965.
Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin. Ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander
Wedderbum. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev.
ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.
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114
Chapter Three
Beauty Reading Herself: Woman as Ornament in Felix Holt
And yet there is something suspicious about beauty, especially beauty
in women, as we saw in the efforts to domesticate or otherwise contain
Hetty’s power in Adam Bede. In this chapter I explore how Felix Holt
articulates this unease through the concept of “ornament”—an unease
expressed insightfully by Ruskin in his own troubled assessment of ornament
in architecture. The metaphor of ornament expresses well the ambiguity of
women’s power as it is a metaphor of relation: the variety of relationships of
ornament to the structure it decorates illustrates various possible relationships
of woman to her world. Woman’s choice can be figured as a decision
between becoming some “true” theoretic beauty and operating merely as an
ornament. This choice also allows woman to increase her agency by
embracing the role not only of aesthetic object (like Hetty) but also of critic
or interpreter of beauty (like Adam). It is her critical perception of her own
beauty and its potential power, in fact, that allows her to embody that beauty
in a moral, non-ornamental way.
But her own beliefs are not enough for her power to work in the
world. Esther Lyon’s choice between becoming a beauty or an ornament is
represented in part by her two very different suitors: the rich “Independent”
Harold Transome, who already possesses an ornamental mother and who
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offers a superficial life to which both ladies’ physical beauty and social ease
have made them eminently suitable; and the “Radical” agitator Felix Holt,
who offers a life of work among and connection to people unlike herself.
Equally important as these options is the contrast between the understanding
Esther and Felix eventually reach and the lack of sympathy Harold and his
mother experience. For Eliot, man and woman, the observer as well as the
beautiful object, together decide the moral quality of the female partner, and
so of their world. For an Eliot heroine, there is a particular kind of goodness,
a particular way that that she and her mate understand her inner life, her role
as critic, which allows them to participate in a mutual aesthetic vision, a
mutual agreement not only about how a woman’s inner beauty should match
her outer appearance, but also about how the couple will exist in relation to
the world around them.
“Surface Work” vs. “Intellectual Intent”: Ruskin and Ornament
Early in his Seven Lamps of Architecture (1848), Ruskin’s treatise
analyzing the formal and moral beauties of various kinds of civic
architecture, ornament arouses his suspicion. As may be expected from a
thinker with a sensitivity both to the complexity of the relationship between
morality and beauty and to the nuances of language, a word such as
“ornament” expresses a sense of falsity:
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Nobody wants ornaments in this world, but everybody wants
integrity. All the fair devices that ever were fancied, are not worth a
lie. Leave your walls as bare as a planed board, or build them of
baked mud and chopped straw, if need be; but do not rough-cast them
with falsehood. . . .for ornament is an extravagant and inessential
thing; and, therefore, if fallacious, utterly base.... (8: 83)
When ornament obscures some underlying flaw in the building’s structure,
then its beauty is a lie. Ruskin indicts the world that “fancies” such
“devices”: what the world “wants” is not more ornamentation—there is too
much ornament is this world as it is. What it needs, as well as what it should
desire, is integrity. Better no beauty at all if it is a lie; the parts that we see
should represent the quality of the whole that we cannot. What such lying
parts obscure about their wholes is not always obvious. For Ruskin, a much
deeper corruption than simply “fallacious” decoration is that ornamentation
which keeps us from experiencing an even greater beauty. In a passage
which he will later come to see as a “vulgar attack on Roman-Catholicism,”1
the Roman Church’s use of ornament in this, to him inexplicable, way is the
focus of that attack:
The treatment of the Papists’ temple is eminently exhibitory; it is
surface work throughout; and the danger and evil of their church
decoration lie, not in its reality—not in the true wealth and art of it, of
which the lower people are never cognizant—but in its tinsel and
glitter, in the gilding of the shrine and painting of the image, in
embroidery of dingy robes and crowding of imitated gems; all this
being frequently thrust forward to the concealment of what is really
good or great in their buildings. (8: 4n3)
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The “tinsel and glitter” of these ornaments conceal “what is really good or
great in their buildings.” Although this “surface work,” ironically, may
represent “true wealth and art”—true beauty “in its reality”— such worth is
not recognized by “the lower people” for whom such display is intended.
The predominance of decoration, the fact that it is “surface work throughout”
obscures not only the basic building, but also the art of the individual
decorations. When used as decoration, true gold becomes tinsel. If the
intention of the builder is to create a work that is “eminently exhibitory,” then
his goal is to impress based upon a display of wealth, whether of material or
of workmanship. This display of abundance, purely for abundance’s sake, is
“the danger and evil” of ornament, for it misdirects the eye from the true
architectural worth of both the whole of the building and its parts: the
ornamental part is “thrust forward” to catch the attention of the uninformed.
Such ornament is beauty used inappropriately—is “glitter” not gold.
Although ornament may appear irredeemable after such an attack,
Ruskin does find it valuable when used in a more proper relationship to
“truer” beauty. For example, decorativeness can be useful as a contrast to
simpler beauty:
It is not less the boast of some styles that they can bear ornament, than
of others that the can do without it; but we do not often enough reflect
that those very styles, of so haughty simplicity, owe part of their
pleasurableness to contrast, and would be wearisome if universal.
They are but the rests and monotones of the art, it is to its far happier,
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118
far higher, exaltation that we owe those fair fronts of variegated
mosaic, charged with wild fancies and dark hosts of imagery, thicker
and quainter. . . . (8: 53)
Ornament can offer the eye a contrast to the “simplicity” we might have
expected him to unequivocally endorse after the attack on the “Papists’
temple.” To act as variety and relief from “wearisome” similarity, however,
reveals the subordinate role of the ornamental styles: “the art” of architecture
as a whole is “exalted” because “those fair fronts of variegated mosaic”
increase the “pleasurableness” of the “so haughty simplicity” of the purer
styles. Indeed, without that contrast, such simplicity may more rarely appear
so “haughty.” Aside from this concern with the proper relationship of
ornament to a building’s, or a whole “art’s,” overall design, ornament can
have worth of its own. As gilding is made from gold, individual ornaments
can be assessed as worthy art in themselves:
Ornament, as I have often before observed, has two entirely distinct
sources of agreeableness: one, that of the abstract beauty of its forms,
which, for the present, we will suppose to be the same whether they
come from the hand or the machine; the other, the sense of human
labor and care spent upon it... our consciousness of its being the
work of poor, clumsy, toilsome man. Its true delightfulness depends
on our discovering in it the record of thoughts, and intents, and trials,
and heart-breakings—of recoveries and joyfulnesses of success: all
this can be traced by a practiced eye; but, granting it even obscure, it
is presumed or understood; and, in that is the worth of the thing, just
as much as the worth of anything we call precious. (8: 82)
The beauty of ornament can be theoretic as well as aesthetic. More important
than the beauty of its “abstract forms,” for Ruskin, is its beauty as the record
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and symbol of human work, the “thoughts, intents, trials, heartbreakings” as
well as the physical labor of its production. The key relationship in any
understanding of beauty is between the work of art and the craftsman who
creates it. The story of beauty is the story of work.
An important aspect of the story of work is the intent that the laborer
bring to it: his aims should incorporate maximizing the beauty of both the
individual part and the relationship of that part to the structures which sustain
it and which it sustains. Late in Seven Lamps. Ruskin observes,
I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply
this: Was it done with enjoyment—was the carver happy while he was
about it? It may be the hardest work possible, and the harder because
so much pleasure was taken in it; but it must have been happy too, or
it will not be living... .Better the rudest work that tells a story or
records a fact, than the richest without meaning. There should not be
a single ornament put upon great civic buildings, without some
intellectual intention. (8: 218, 230)
Given the interdependence of work, meaning, appearance, and feeling in
Ruskin’s work, it should come as no surprise that Ruskin’s judgment of
ornament ultimately rests upon the “inner” criteria of intent and emotional
experience rather than upon the “outer” criteria of physical form. In contrast
to the Papists’ temple whose ornamentation panders to the greed of man’s
eye, Ruskin leaves us with “great civic buildings” whose whole purpose is
the “intellectual” reconciliation of space and structure to human community
and order.
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“Surface Work Throughout”: The Transomes as Ornament
With the character Mrs. Transome, Harold’s faded beauty of a
mother, Eliot draws attention to the “surface work” that a beautiful woman’s
life can become. Mrs. Transome is like Ruskin’s papist temple: she wears
ornaments, is seen as an ornament, and, signifies clearly the limited kind of
power that such a role brings her. When she is introduced, Eliot describes in
detail the way that she clings to the decorations of her dress even though they
are worn and out of fashion:
the fine lace of her cuffs and collar, and of the small veil which fell
backwards over her high comb, was visibly mended; but rare, jewels
flashed on her hands, which lay on her folded black-clad arms like
finely cut onyx cameos. (86)
Not only does she rather ostentatiously wear her decorations, but her very
arms become decorations as well. In this way, Mrs.Transome was “wont to
look queenly of an evening” (102). This slippage between wearing ornament
and becoming one agrees with local ancient general opinion, for “forty years
ago, when she came into this country, they said she was a pictur’” (82 sic).
The decoration and the ability to strike others aesthetically, along with, Eliot
implies, her sexual attractiveness in that “forty years ago,” all have won for
her a certain position, and a certain amount of socially-awarded power. Not
only does her personal servant consider her “a goddess,” but the narrator also
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alludes to her as an “empress”: “Her person was too typical of social
distinctions to be passed by with indifference by anyone; it would have fitted
an empress in her own right” (102, 104). Because her intent is to impress
through her skill in social manipulation of her image, her power to affect
others with her presence, her relationships to any “whole” are impermanent.
Like the ornament of Ruskin’s Roman catholic churches, and like the
empire they represent, Mrs. Transome “effect” implies a disturbingly
imperial character, one that bases its authority in the power of appearances,
of show. Although she is considered a goddess by her servant, that servant
understands that “it is not necessary or likely that a goddess should be very
moral” (102). And the narrator tells us that this “empress” had to “dare
violation of treaties and dread retributive invasions, to grasp after new
territories, to be defiant in desperate circumstances, and to feel a woman’s
hunger of the heart forever unsatisfied” (104). She breaks relationships;
shatters wholes. Like other growing empires, she replaces some original state
with a new, false one that in its over-reaching leaves her as “empty” as the
“fallacious” ornament of the papists’ temple leaves its educated observer. In
addition to foreshadowing more explicit revelations of Mrs. Transome’s sin,
this portrait of the old woman hints at something amiss in the decorativeness,
and even the force of appearance, themselves.
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The story of Mrs. Transome’s beauty is one of laboring to become
ornament. Eliot takes care that Mrs. Transome, alone, does not receive all the
blame for this superficiality. Her education, presented as common enough,
carries some of the responsibility. She had been taught to strive for effect:
For Miss Lingon had a superior governess, who held that a woman
should be able to write a good letter, and to express herself with
propriety on general subjects. And it is astonishing how effective this
education appeared in a handsome girl, who sat supremely well on
horseback, sang and played a little, painted small figures in water
colours, had a naughty sparkle in her eyes when she made a daring
quotation, and an air of serious dignity when she recited something,
from her store of correct opinions. (105)
Because of such “superior” governesses, and the demand for such training,
“nobody wants ornaments in this world.” This education is aimed at show, at
appearances. A girl educated in this way will be able to meet her society’s
expectations of her exactly: she will be accomplished in a smattering of
achievements but she will not exceed the level necessary to mark her as an
upper-class marriageable girl. That these achievements are both class-
marked and aimed toward marriage is clear in the qualified way they are
presented. Her governess is deemed “superior,” appropriate to the “elevated”
levels to which Miss Lingon aspires. Her letters are “good,” which, with the
additional ability to “express herself with propriety on general subjects,” we
suspect must be an adjective equating propriety and generality. She is able to
converse, but the attention has been placed on mode of conversation rather
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than content: her “naughty sparkle” or her “air of serious dignity” available
for the suitable occasions. She has been taught, in short, to be an ornament
to any social occasion. Combined with her physical gifts, including her
ability to sit “supremely well on horseback,” such a preparation for life—and
the narrator notes his “astonishment” as if he were an ethnographer observing
a strange culture—“appeared . .. effective.” Her “store of correct opinions”
presented in such a pleasant frame has been “made to tell in elegant society.”
In short, she succeeds in what these accomplishments, this role, can give her:
marrying well, though Eliot adds the nice touch that the Transomes live the
life of “our poorer gentry” which was “monotonous” and “narrowing” (104)
rather like her preparation for it. This story is about the “thrusting forward”
of the self into a minor, though socially powerful, part of society with no
thought of any greater whole.
Mrs. Transome’s early power is exposed in her old age as a lie in
Ruskin’s terms: “extravagant, inessential and if fallacious, utterly base.” The
final ripping of the veil of “success” from this type of accomplishment is
Mrs. Transome’s own awareness that “what she had once regarded as her
knowledge and accomplishments had become valueless as old-fashioned
stucco ornaments, of which the substance was never worth anything, while
the form is no longer to the taste of any living mortal” (106). Women who
shine with such empty beauty are eventually revealed to be as vulnerable to
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the changing tastes of fashion as any other ornament. As Ruskin reads
national architectural styles as representations of their culture’s moral state,
so too does Eliot read Mrs. Transome loss of power as a sign of her culture’s
“fallaciousness”; the impermanent nature of society’s taste as a sign of its
utter baseness. We see here Ruskin’s ambivalence and rejection of show for
show’s sake, but also the implicit recoil from show itself as inherently empty:
something flawed at its heart as well as in its use.
Mrs. Transome’s paucity of “intellectual intention” is a danger not
just to her society, but to herself as well. As the narrator notes, “no amount
of bloom and beauty can make” her “store of correct ideas . . . a perennial
source of interest in things not personal” (105). This education, for all its
attention to the reactions of those about her, is not one that promotes interest
in much else than self. What an education should aim for is an interest in
“what is true and, in general, good for mankind”—knowledge and concerns
that are worthy in themselves, but also some help in “circumstances of
temptation and difficulty” (106). Like the laborer preparing his mosaic,
“intellectual” work is worthy in itself not just for its eventual effect on those
who will see it. Her ideas can act as consolation to herself and “tell” in
society as well, can be beautiful as well as ornamental. A deeper moral
knowledge of the world and of herself, and an interest in acting according to
that knowledge, may have saved Mrs. Transome from her mistakes. She
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could have inhabited a wider and richer world than the one over which she
reigned.
Such an emphasis on show turns out to be self-limiting, isolating the
female laborer from other people as well as other times. Mrs. Transome’s
sitting room is decorated with paintings: portraits of ancestors and even a
battle painting (87). To her, these “relations” and the representation of war
serve as decoration, as background setting, framing her and her life.
Ultimately she becomes a figurine on a satin cushion to her son, and to
herself, she is “as unnecessary as a chimney ornament” (204). Late in the
novel we see her moving “to and fro amongst the rose-coloured satin of
chairs and curtains—the great story of the world reduced for her to the little
tale of her own existence—dull obscurity everywhere, except where the keen
light fell on the narrow track of her own lot, wide only for a woman’s
anguish” (438). She lives an ornamented and ornamental life. Choosing to
live amongst objects, to value such objects and the social position they
signify as her gods, has left her imagination and her conception of the world
truly narrow: her world is small and her own anguish is more than enough to
fill it. There is no non-suffering place for her, no perspective, no distance
from which she can gain relief from that room, even the past that that her
furniture represents is not real enough for her to be an imaginative escape.
We, as readers, can offer her sympathy where she cannot return it. This
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invocation of sympathy on our part teaches the lesson that offering sympathy
to others can help us to understand our own pain as part of some greater
communal experience. From moving through that room in anguish, Mrs.
Transome tells the tactfully sympathetic Esther (touched with wondering pity
at signs of unhappiness that were new to her experience) to “Run away from
me without ceremony. Every one else does, you see. I am part of the old
furniture with new drapery” (553). Her own inability to find connections to
the world leads to her bitterness and to a rejection of possible new
relationships such as Esther herself might offer.
Mrs. Transome is an ornament without relation to any real structure;
she is isolated from much more than other people. Her aim to be “effective”
in society is just one example of the narrow focus of her desires. Her wishes
in life are for certain specific and concrete events as seen in “the desire that
her first, rickety, ugly, imbecile child should die, and leave room for her
darling, of whom she could be proud.” She saw Harold, the “darling,” as an
ornament to her own life, a possession or achievement that would bring glory
to herself. Her ugly son is despised precisely because he cannot add to her
effect. The disconnection from others revealed by her narrow focus is
matched only by her disassociation from any sustaining narrative:
Such desires make life a hideous lottery, where every day may turn up
a blank; where men and women who have the softest beds and the
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most delicate eating . . . yet grow haggard, fevered, and restless, like
those who watch in other lotteries. (98)
This kind of desire has led to passive waiting rather than constructive action.
She waits or acts upon circumstances just as she judges upon them. Her
narratives are limited to and focused on immediate effect, revealing no other
relation to the world than isolated, immediate desire. In her “part in life” as
the “clever sinner” (91), Mrs. Transome is like other such sinners who are
constantly “weaving new futures” and “whose actions have kept them in a
habitual fear of consequences” (97). Such a narrative, because it has such a
narrow focus, reveals her fear of consequences different from that
immediately desired one, her fear of all connections, especially those of cause
and effect over which she has no control. Mrs. Transome and those like her
are rudderless in a world of events and objects. Since they have no deeper
guides or standards, they too ultimately are just another object in a sea of
other objects battered about by the inexplicable forces of circumstance. In
contrast, we will see that Felix and later Esther will choose to act without
reference to immediate effect (Mr. Lyon, Esther’s adoptive minister father, is
perhaps the most extreme example of this opposite ethic).
Such isolation is not just a consequence of feminine omamentality,
but can describe certain male roles as well—can describe a whole realm of
practicality which subordinates morality and beauty to more limited because
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more self-interested kinds of success. Harold, like his mother, is obsessed
with effect, though of a different kind. His lack of sympathy, a lack of
connection to others, is tied to this tendency. His “indifference to any
impressions in others which did not further or impede his own purposes”
(101), implies a latent ability to recognize those “impressions,” to be more
understanding of others, but his concentration on “his own purposes” allows
him to ignore their existence: “even if he could have conceived what his
mother’s feeling was, his mind, after that momentary arrest, would have
darted forward in its usual course” (93). In addition to being able to
“conceive” of another person’s feelings, the participants must also be able to
do something with that conception beyond categorizing people as objects of a
certain type or value. Both mother and son suffer, according to Eliot, from
their inability to see others as other than furniture: “Harold Transome did not
choose to spend time the whole evening with his mother. It was his habit to
compress a great deal of effective conversation into a short space of time,
asking rapidly all the questions he wanted answered” (108). Aside from
supplying information, conversation has no other instrumental use: Harold
“disliked all quarrelling as an unpleasant expenditure of energy that could
have no good practical result.” Harold sees no desirable goals such as the
compromise of thoughts or opinions; he cannot see anyone influencing him
once he is on “any course he had chosen” (111).
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In a man, however, such compartmentalization and single-mindedness
is awarded a social approval that woman and her ambiguous omamentality
are not. Harold, with his “much keener consciousness of his independent
existence than of his relation to her” and his lack of “eagerness to make his
life at all familiar to” her is only a more extreme version of his mother who,
with her “mother’s love,” that “enlarging, expansion of animal existence” and
“suppression of self’ (97, 98) at least attempts to understand him. Mrs.
Transome is rather like Adam Bede’s Hetty Sorrel, except that her
motherhood has affected her positively. Harold, with “the energetic will and
muscle, the self-confidence, the quick perception, and the narrow imagination
which make what is admiringly called the practical mind” (196) is hardly any
higher than an animal, even though society is pleased to honor such
characters with the term “practical mind.” He, even more than his mother, is
a more fortunate version of Hetty, one whose sex carries with it the
imprimatur of rationality: in his sphere of labor, his self-interest becomes a
valuable asset. Eliot casts what this society approves as rational in terms that
read clearly as limited and even animalistic in its preoccupation with its own
good, the opposite, in her scheme, of true rationality. Ironically, Harold lives
down to his own assessment of women who, to him, “showed a transition
from the feebly animal to the thinking being” (454). As Eliot shows, both
Harold and his ornamental women think and plan according to “effect,” to a
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particular end, rather than to any more complex standard of behavior or
judgment.
One problem with this kind of beauty for any greater moral project is
that it has limited potential to influence others; it is definitely worthy of
suspicion. Besides intimidating or awing those around her, Mrs. Transome in
her old age no longer has much practical power. Indeed, the power she once
wielded was never of the guiding, or inspiring kind. We see this failure
primarily in her relationship with Harold. The failure of influence between
them is due to the lack of something very like Ruskin’s “intellectual
intention” in the creation of ornamentation (or any other art). Harold’s
response to his mother exposes the danger’s inherent in women’s isolation as
ornament. When he returns from the East, we see how the distinctions that
once “thrust her forward” have now relegated her to the sidelines. Whatever
pleasures there may have been in her ability to strike others with her presence
and her personality, by the time the novel opens her neighbors no longer visit,
and her beauty has faded. Now that she nears the end of the life that her
choices have brought her, however, her omamentality has become relatively
powerless. One of Harold’s first comments is in admiration of her shape:
“The old women at Smyrna are like sacks. You’ve not got clumsy and
shapeless” (90). Luckily so, since “you are as straight as an arrow still; you
will carry the shawls I have brought you as well as ever” (93). She has
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become a display rack of sorts for the exotic pieces he has brought back to
England. From Harold’s perspective, she is past narrative, and almost past
effect. Ironically, her role has become the support or frame for
ornamentation from a foreign empire (though one that the British are in the
process of conquering), and as such quite different from her own.
A world that reads beauty as ornament, a world that narrowly values
woman’s physical and social “effect” is a world that is resistant to feminine
influence. Mrs. Transome’s lack of power is due in part to the fact that her
son recognizes none in her. Harold represents a world that does not
recognize relationships or connections of a moral sort, and as such is
handicapped in its creation of a healthy community. As living for the petty
power of “effect,” rather than according to any more constructive aim, is key
to Mrs. Transome’s failure to guide or to help her son, so too is it central to
his failure to even recognize any attempt to do so on her part. When a man
“hates English wives: they want to give their opinion on everything ” and
believes that they “interfere with a man’s life” (94), any form of female
influence would make no impression. Assertions of judgment on a woman’s
part would be liable to be taken as mere “opinion,” and an opinion that is
alien to “a man’s life”—though that would be precisely the point of such
difference in the ideology of the separate spheres. But for such an ideology
to work, for the domestic sphere to influence the public one of woman’s male
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relatives, those men need to be receptive to women’s judgment. Harold,
seeing his mother (and all women) as mere ornament, does not believe in
their ability to judge: “Women, very properly, don’t change their views, but
keep to the notions in which they have been brought up. It doesn’t signify
what they think—they are not called upon to judge or act” (117). Woman’s
opinion, like her dress, her skills, and her body, is ornament. He is as well
aware as the narrator that certain feminine “views” are put upon for social
effect, that women are educated to just that purpose. The difference of course
is that the narrator finds fault with this education while Harold finds it
“proper.” In fact, after giving his mother this canvas of her sex, he reassures
her of her continued place in his esteem, such as it is, by offering her “a new
carriage”— a thing of pleasure and show, an equal exchange for her own will
and judgment as he sees them. Women’s opinions are like that “resource of
many a well-born and unhappy woman,” her “daily embroidery,” which
allow women “occupation” but they “produce what neither she nor anyone
else wanted” (176). This understanding of woman’s intellectual work results
in isolation instead of connection, no matter what the woman herself may
judge it to do. Their “thinking” and their sewing are socially constructed to
be effective only in creating a picture of proper femininity not in any product
useful to either themselves or the world around them. Even Mrs. Transome is
aware of the problem: “She would not reply to words which showed how
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completely any conception of herself and her feelings was excluded from her
son’s inner world” (94). The ability to connect is necessary on both sides,
and Harold does not have such sympathy. From his perspective, his mother
should be completely happy in her role as ornamental old lady: “You shall
have nothing to do now but be grandmamma on satin cushions” (95)—even
the grandmotherly role is subordinate to positioning, doll-like, on cushions.
He understands his mother and her role visually. Now that she wishes to
break free from the confines of that role, it is impossible. For woman’s
power to work, both partners in the dynamic need to be able to imagine the
other in the appropriate reciprocal role. Without a sympathetic imagination,
amongst other things, Harold is not likely to do so.
Fine-Ladies and Gentlemanly Speakers: Esther as Critic, Language as
Ornament
Esther Lyon’s initial social interaction shows the clear influence of a
worldly education: an education like Mrs. Transome’s aimed at effect. She is
skilled in a feminine style of conversation: “Esther was that excellent thing in
a woman, a soft voice with a clear fluent utterance. Her sauciness was
always charming, because it was without emphasis, and was accompanied
with little graceful turns of the head” (151). Her natural gift of a “soft voice”
is supplemented by “a clear fluent utterance,” “graceful turns of the head,”
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and the control to reach just the right note of “sauciness” to remain
“charming” rather than offensive. Like the older woman, Esther’s strength
seems to lie in her attention to the mode of behavior proper to her social
situation. Esther is an advertisement for her education, one that we can guess
was much like Miss Lingon’s, so much so that her qualifications for tutoring
Treby Magna’s young ladies are obvious to all. We see the standards of that
education in her attack on the unfortunate Miss Jermyn: according to Esther,
this woman “considers herself a judge of what is ladylike, and she is
vulgarity personified—with large feet, and the most odious scent on her
handkerchief, and a bonnet that looks like ‘The Fashion’ printed in capital
letters.” To Esther, Miss Jermyn’s obtrusively noticeable parts overwhelm
the ladylike whole she would like to convey. To Felix Holt’s objection that
“one sort of fine ladyism is as good as another,” she replies that “a real fine-
lady does not wear clothes that flair in people’s eyes, or use importunate
scents, or make a noise as she moves: she is something refined, and graceful,
and charming, and never obtrusive” (153). Esther is able to articulate the
prevailing middle class feminine virtues. Although these skills are “never
obtrusive,” their presence is something less than natural; like Mrs. Transome,
Esther has been educated to be an ornament.
Unlike Mrs. Transome, however, Esther’s preoccupation with fine
ladylike accessories is attributed as much to her sense of taste as it is to her
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135
education. Esther initially sees the policing of language as a proper sphere
for the exercise of her fine judgment. Mr. Lyon, the town’s dissenting
minister and her (secretly) adoptive father, understands language to be
absolute and as “an eager seeker for precision . . . would fain find language
subtle enough to follow the utmost intricacies of the soul’s pathways.” From
this position, he cannot see why any word used for objects “made and blessed
by the Creator, should be branded and banished as a malefactor” (152). In
contrast, Esther is a “critic of words” who often corrects her father’s “on the
ground of niceties” which to him are “as dark . . . as if they were the reports
of a sixth sense which” he doesn’t possess (151-2). This other “sense” could
be called Esther’s taste: “She had one of those exceptional organisations
which are quick and sensitive without being in the least morbid; she was alive
to the finest shades of manner, to the nicest distinction of tone and accent.”
Eliot represents Esther’s “fastidious taste” as an actual aesthetic response, not
mere social mystification. She has the “quick and sensitive” response
required of connoisseurs which discerns the distinctions that lead to fine
assessments. This taste responds to more than linguistic niceties. In her
father’s house, there were “certain things that were incongruous with the
general air of sombemess and privation,” including “the delicate scent of
dried rose-leaves,” a “wax-candle” as opposed to the cheaper tallow, and “a
dainty work-basket frilled with blue satin” (139). Esther’s choices, while
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they are decorative, are presented as at least partially resulting from
something other than a simple desire for effect or show. Mr. Lyon explains
the “incongruities” as “this undue luxury” which “is paid for with the
earnings of my daughter, who is so delicately framed that the smell of tallow
is loathsome to her” (140). Although the father names these additions “undue
luxury” and contrasts his own practice as abstaining “from judging by the
outward appearance only” (140), he recognizes that to Esther it is more than
simple “outward appearance” that impress her. As aesthetic response, the
operation of taste reveals some connection to the world through the physical
reaction of ears, nose, and eyes. In such a matter, though, we run into the
same problem that haunts Ruskin’s assessment of good art: it is difficult to
separate class bias from an “objective” assessment of value. Such an
interpretive difficulty, however, at least allows for the possibility that
Esther’s seeming frivolity is a sign of some greater facility.
If Esther is a creature with a fine aesthetic sense, it is one that Eliot
clearly presents as misdirected. Esther has chosen the wrong focus for her
attention, one that produces an idiosyncratic system of judgment:
she had a little code of her own about scents and colours, textures and
behavior, by which she secretly condemned or sanctioned all things
and persons. And she was well satisfied with her fastidious taste,
never doubting that hers was the highest standard” (159).
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Esther focuses her response on superficialities, on modes of behavior—on
what from another perspective clearly is ornament. The clearest sign of her
immaturity as critic is the assessment she makes of her own ability: “she felt
that it was her superiority that made her unable to use without disgust any but
the finest cambric handkerchiefs and freshest gloves” (159-60). Esther’s
“exceptional organisation” is reduced to focusing on accessories. The
centrality of such a taste to Esther’s moral condition is clear in her judgment
of other people. Although she “felt sure that she was generous” because “she
hated all meanness” and “would empty her purse impulsively on some
sudden appeal to her pity” (160), her “horror of appearing ridiculous” has
affected her feelings toward her exceedingly unfashionable father: “She
fancied that she should have loved her mother better than she was able to
love her father” (161). Her critical fastidiousness has tainted her appreciation
and thus her feeling for her father—her taste has limited her sympathy.
Esther’s reading of the world is based upon finding distinctions in it;
like Mrs. Transome she focuses upon division, not connection. Her
idiosyncratic “little code” of moral assessment is a sign of her own
separateness from the world, though she sees herself as a member of a finer
one. Her horror of not fitting in to that world would be a more morally
appealing feeling if the world she aspired to were not so banal. Felix, in the
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138
course of his rather rough non-courtship, points out to her that that world is
an “ornamental” one:
O, your niceties—I know what they are... .They all go on your
system of make-believe. ‘Rottenness’ may suggest what is
unpleasant, so you’d better say ‘sugar-plums’, or something else such
a long way off that nobody is obliged to think of it. Those are your
round-about euphemisms that dress up swindling till it looks as well
as honesty, and shoot with boiled pease instead of bullets. I hate your
gentlemanly speakers. (152)
Felix’s attack on this linguistic “system of make-believe” echoes Ruskin’s
charge that ornament, “if fallacious,” is “utterly base.” Felix’s representation
of that system is a caricature, but we suspect that it is a pretty accurate one.
He understands the reasoning behind the “banishment” of words because he
understands their connotations and a certain class response to their
implications. Esther, too, as an educator in these matters, would be a master
of the system at work here. Where she deems it a practice proper for ladies
and gentlemen, however, he deems it a “system of make-believe” practiced
by euphemistic “gentlemanly speakers.”
Felix begins to change the direction of Esther’s aesthetic focus
through a redefinition of the concept of “taste” itself. In their argument about
the value of taste, both Esther and Felix show an ability to make rather fine
intellectual distinctions. Felix points out what underlies Esther’s
differentiation between “opinion” and “taste”: “But by opinions you mean
men’s thoughts about great subjects, and by taste you mean their thoughts on
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small ones; dress, behaviour, amusements, ornaments.” Esther, accepting
that distinction, adds one of her own: “Well-yes-or rather, their sensibilities
about those things.” For Esther, judgment is based upon the response of the
body rather than of the intellect. Felix synthesizes their positions: “It comes
to the same thing: thoughts, opinions, knowledge, are only sensibility to facts
and ideas.” As Dorothea Brook in Middlemarch will desire a knowledge that
comes to her as feeling, Esther learns the possibility of refocusing her
“sensibility” on more important material: thoughts as well as things. Felix
argues, and Eliot supports that argument through Esther’s successful
conversion, that socially significant judgment is akin to taste. Women,
though they might not be educated in the rhetoric of “political economy,”
have the potential to intervene in “public” affairs based upon their natural
sensitivity to social meaning.
As Esther relearns her language in order to see relation in the world
rather than distinction, she actually learns to see a world very different from
her familiar world of social niceties. To do so, she must learn to read past
“the appearance” the world makes to her “educated” eye to the emotional
existence which underlies it. On Esther’s visit to their humble abode, Felix
remarks that the boy he and his mother care for, Job, “has two mansions,”
clearly an ironic use of the term, but one whose meaning becomes enriched in
the course of their conversation. He first explains the reference literally: “he
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lives here chiefly; but he has another home, where his grandfather, Mr Tudge
the stonebreaker, lives. My mother is very good to Job, Miss Lyon. She has
made him a little bed in a cupboard and she gives him sweetened porridge.”
Esther is affected by the feeling that accompanies the words: “The exquisite
goodness in these words of Felix impressed Esther the more, because in her
hearing his talk had usually been pungent and denunciatory. Looking at Mrs.
Holt, she saw that her eyes had lost their bleak northeasterly expression, and
were shining with some mildness on little Job, who had turned towards her,
propping his head against Felix” (324). Through the Holts’ kindness, both in
their “help” and in the emotion that is clear even through their roughness, a
“little bed in a cupboard” has become a “mansion.” The contrasts between
the “pungent and denunciatory” Felix and this “exquisitely kind” one, as
between the “bleak northeasterly” Mrs. Holt and the “mild” one, reinforces
the sincerity of their kindness. Where “your gentlemanly speakers”
counterfeit kindnesses in their in order to avoid their own distress and to
mark themselves as members of a particular class, these two claim
membership in that larger group, humanity, by claiming another being as fit
to join them. Their act of kindness makes the claim for them, not their choice
of vocabulary. As “mansions” become something less and more than
elegantly large buildings, so does one of Esther’s pet words, “gentleman.”
She still protests her lack of interest in Felix as a lover, assuring herself that
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“he is quite above putting a false interpretation on what I have done” in
visiting him, signaling that she does understand that his use of “mansions” is
not a false one. She now notes that “There was something greater and better
in him than I had imagined. His behavior today—to his mother and me too—
I should call it the highest gentlemanliness, only it seems in him to be
something deeper” (326). Up to this point, to call a man gentlemanly would
be the “highest” approbation Esther could have given, but now even the
“highest gentlemanliness” seems inadequate to describe the character she is
observing in Felix. Her old vocabulary, and its accompanying standards,
come to seem too shallow to indicate the true value of someone who lives
beyond her familiar, and now limited, social values. She recognizes that her
old words were ornamental; the “rougher” usage of the Holts is preferable to
her elegant lies. With the change in her language, Esther is able to see a
different world than the one she has inhabited to this point—she has become
a better critic.
Utopias and Good Strong Terrible Visions: The Moral Work of the
Imagination
But reading the world is not merely a question of rightly interpreting
material signs, even the difficult matter of discerning the intention behind the
use of words or the ability to see the beauty in rough appearances. For Eliot,
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imagined world’s can be as important as the material one. Through Felix’s
moral tutoring of Esther, Eliot addresses those elusive “wholes,” those social
buildings which everyone is engaged in constructing. Felix claims to be “a
man warned by visions. We are saved by making the future present to
ourselves” (365). Felix uses his imagination and his response to that
imagination to keep himself on his chosen moral path. Unlike Mrs.
Transome, he does not see life as a lottery. Instead, he is guided by his vision
of a future world created by his actions; a future that exists complexly as a
whole, not narrowly as the vision of an immediate and selfish desire. These
visions, thus, remind him of relations, of consequences, a reminder that is
bracing not frightening. Esther wishes that she too “could get visions, then,”
and Felix supports that desire: “I do believe in you; but I want you to have
such a vision of the future that you may never lose your best self’ —while he
believes that she has a best self, he is not sure whether or not she can live by
it. In Eliot’s construction of moral reality, such visions of the future, and the
skill and courage to see and to live by them, build the integrity that is so
wanting in this world. Such vision also forms part of the inner work that
produces a morally beautiful woman:
Some charm or other may be flung about you—some of your atta-of-
rose fascinations—and nothing but a good strong terrible vision will
save you. And if it did save you, you might be that woman I was
thinking of a little while ago when I looked at your face: the woman
whose beauty makes a great task easier to men instead of turning
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them away from it. I am not likely to see such fine issues; but they
may come where a woman’s spirit is finely touched. I should like to
be sure they would come to you. (366)
Felix’s description reflects Ruskin’s distinction between that great civic
building and the papists’ temple; her face should “tell a story,” the story of
the “saving” of her own character, and as such its beauty would communicate
her better intentions. He hopes for Esther’s spirit to be “finely touched” by
her imagined visions of the future. The correct response to such projected
scenes is tantamount to virtue. The strength of the reaction to the vision lies
in the woman’s moral force, her moral sense.
Esther, who has had a superficial education, reading images and
scenes according to class or material value rather than for moral impact,
undergoes a sort of remedial course in reading taught by Felix. In turn,
Esther teaches Felix about woman’s difficulty in accessing that greater
relationship to the world and to her own moral ability. In discussing his own
vision of his future, his choosing to “toil for the fortunes” of a larger family
than an immediate one, Esther points out that “A woman can hardly ever
choose in that way; she is dependent upon what happens to her. She must
take meaner things, because only meaner things are within her reach” (367).
She signals in this moment an improvement in her moral vision, the
separation from a worldly frame of reference and the ability to assess it and
her past fantasies as “mean.” She is able, at least in her imagination, to
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choose not to choose that world. When Felix asks her whether she can
“imagine” herself “choosing such a hardship as the better lot?”, he is asking
whether she can live up to her better imagination, to that better imagined
future. In comparing her responses to this “better” future to her responses to
other potential futures as well as to the present, Esther is performing what
looks remarkably like an aesthetic judgment. As with Dinah Morris in Adam
Bede, this experience is then recast in religious terms: it is “the first religious
experience of her life—the first self-questioning, the first voluntary
subjection, the first longing to acquire the strength of greater motives and
obey the more strenuous rule” (369). The process of beginning to make a
judgment, whether moral or aesthetic, that first step of “forgetting self,” and
letting the “natural” responses free, is seen here as a “longing” to match the
approved of vision, one which is cast outside the self. To not do so, of
course, leaves the origin of the vision in question, but it also reinforces the
desirability of making connections between the self and the world, even if
that world is a projection of one’s own imagination. Such confusion leaves
those powerful visions safely undescribed. The reader is allowed to fill in the
details herself.
After her testimony on his behalf at Felix’s trial, Esther describes her
exaltation in terms not of vision, but of action, of work. Esther is in a new
state: she has been awakened to “strong determining thought.. . .[H]er mind
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was in that state of highly-wrought activity, that large discourse, in which we
seem to stand aloof from our own life—weighing impartially our own
temptations and the weak desires that most habitually solicit us. ‘I think I am
getting that power Felix wished me to have: I shall soon see strong visions...
.” (586). She is a “state of highly-wrought activity”: thinking, weighing,
getting. In “standing aloof from [her] own life,” she is able to see how it
functions as a whole. She has let go of her self in preparation for making that
most important decision about what kind of life to lead. And that decision
will not be ratified by a simple pleasure, either in the material rewards of the
world or in the expression of her will:
There was something which she now felt profoundly to be the best
thing that life could give her. But—if it was to be had at all—it was
not to be had without paying a heavy price for it, such as we must pay
for what is greatly good. A supreme love, a motive that gives a
sublime rhythm to a woman’s life, and exalts habit into partnership
with the soul’s highest needs, is not to be had where and how she
wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is
hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness. It is
not true that love makes all things easy: it makes us choose what is
difficult. (590)
This is a rejection of rigid control over her narrative, over effects, as well as
renunciation of the simple satisfactions of material and class taste. It is an
acceptance of motive and intention over attainment—an acceptance of the
higher pleasure of interpreting larger texts than that of town life. The story of
Esther’s moral beauty is the story of labor, the story of her decision to “tread
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where it is hard to tread, and [to] feel the chill air, and watch through
darkness.” Her love for Felix is not the culmination of her labors, but rather
her choice of “what is difficult,” her choice of continued moral work.
In contrast to the vagueness of Felix and Esther’s “good strong
terrible visions” is the detail of Esther’s “meaner” one. A running theme in
the novel is Esther’s “little private Utopia” which embodies all her initial
desires and as such represents her imagined possession of all “the signs and
luxuries of ladyhood”: “She had seen every mat in her carriage, had scented
the dried rose-leaves in her corridors, had felt the soft carpets under her pretty
feet, etc.” For all of this, “she had the keenest perception”: even though she
is “fixed” on signs and luxuries, her imagination is a strong one: she “scents”
i
and “feels” as well as “sees” this imagined world. Eliot notes, in a clear
comparison to Mrs. Transome, that Esther’s Utopia, “like other Utopias, was
filled with delightful results, independent of processes” (474). Eliot displays
here her own skepticism about ideal visions, and, given this small dig at
utopias, at ideal social visions in particular. This skepticism of Esther to a
certain extent inoculates Eliot’s authorial sanctioning of Felix against the
charge of naivete—just as she inoculates Esther against the charge that she is
unrealistically good. But her novel’s point is not that women are angels or
that ideal visions are achievable. Rather, the point of ideals is to strive for
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them, both in social and personal realms—as we see if we reverse the
emphasis of Esther’s childish dreams and value process over results.
This distinction between facile ideal vision and “strong terrible ones”
is also one of stasis versus flux, a difference that Esther must learn in order to
read the world properly. Staying at Transome Court as newly discovered
“lost” heiress to the property and potential wife to Harold, Esther’s “intensest
life was no longer in her dreams, where she made things to her own mind;
she was moving in a world charged with forces” (476). She must move back
from her vision to the actual world, a world that is constructed of processes
that produce the effects she sees. Once she acknowledges the existence of
these processes, however, she must judge them as well as their effects. Faced
in Transome Court with what once seemed her utopia (her fantasy no-place),
she recognizes that it is an actual place with consequences: it is topia, a place,
and as such it has a history. Part of its history, of the processes that made it
what it is, is its shallow appreciation of ornamental beauty, of appearance
over substance. Part of its seductiveness to Esther is that it recognizes her as
one of its own: “it is a lot that would become you admirably,” Mrs. Transome
tells her (479). Transome Court is a ready-made, familiar setting prepared to
accept Esther as its central ornament: her physical surroundings would match
and frame her own physical beauty, just as has long been the case in her
daydreams.
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Transome Court has a present as well as a past. As sign of both, Old
Mr. Transome poses an interpretive, and as such, a moral problem for Esther:
“Certainly this had never been part of the furniture she had imagined for the
delightful aristocratic dwelling in her Utopia... .She found it impossible to
arrange their existence in the seclusion of this fine park and in this lofty
large-roomed house, where it seemed quite ridiculous to be anything so small
as a human being” (493). She had not been in the habit of imaging human
beings at all. Mr. Transome’s lack of fitness to his setting forces her to
realize that error. She had been imagining the others as furniture, as
background setting to her own beauty, to her own effect. As she becomes
more familiar with it, the contrast between her Utopian vision and the
actuality becomes even more troubling: “this life at Transome Court was not
the life of her daydreams: there was a dullness already in its ease, and in the
absence of high demand. . . .All life seemed cheapened” (524). Esther is
comparing three ways of life here: Transome Court as it is, her old visionary
daydreams, and a life “better” than either of them, a life only implied at the
moment by her new sense, her “impression” of the flaws in the other two.
She has learned to read Transome Court in a moral way.
Eliot dramatizes the power of worldly readings, a power that seems to
increase even in the face of such insight as Esther is experiencing at
Transome Court. Although she realizes that Transome Court seems only to
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offer a life that is “a compromise with things repugnant to moral taste,”
Esther is caught up in another seductive narrative, that of “worldly wisdom”:
she had begun to feel more profoundly that in accepting Harold
Transome she left the high mountain air, the passionate serenity of
perfect love forever behind her, and must adjust her wishes to a life of
motiveless ease, where poetry was only literature, and the fine ideas
had to be taken down from the shelves of the library when her
husband’s back was turned. But it seemed as if all outward conditions
concurred, along with her generous sympathy for the Transomes, and
with those native tendencies against which she had once begun to
struggle, to make this middling lot the best she could attain to. (547-
48)
Even in her state of “half-sad half-satisfied resignation,” her assessment of
Transome Court matches the narrator’s. There, poetry is only literature, fine
ideas adorn library shelves except when in private: all important, deeply felt
events or representations of those events are mere ornament, like the battle
picture that decorates Mrs. Transome’s sitting room. But “worldly wisdom”
is wily enough to paint this life of mere effect with the inertia of a seeming
inevitability and the fatalism of the “middling lot” which claims even those
who would rise above it. It can champion ornament and dismiss it with a
deprecatory shrug at the same time. Eliot’s focus on “outward conditions,”
so commonly “concurring” with common sense and a sense of the mediocre,
reveals the problem: a lack of initiative or of energy, an absence of the will to
live either according to different conditions or in antagonism to the
“outward” ones that seems so all-determining.
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For Eliot, the ability to read the world has a great effect on Esther’s
own life not just on those she must help. Eliot refers to Esther as writing her
life in a way that Ruskin would not: “Esther found it impossible to read in
these days; her life was a book which she seemed herself to be constructing—
trying to make [character] clear before her, and looking into the ways of
destiny” (398). She is trying to discern the character of those around her, but
also, in the “writing” of her own life, which implies the “judging” of that life,
to construct her own character. Making “character clear before her” is not
only to see it, to understand it and to judge it, but also, in that seeing and
judging, to choose it. She is thinking now of her life as one that a potential
reader would assess. In thinking of choices, and of course, the main choice is
her marital one, she has to deal with other potential narratives, including
“Felix Holt’s prophecy that she would marry Harold Transome” (509) and
her own “undefined sense of Nemesis” which seemed “half to sanctify her
inheritence” (475) of Transome Court and thus of the life it embodies. But
now, accepting either that inheritance or Harold’s proposal has become
something to her that will be a sign of her own “character”—not merely the
appropriate events in the fulfillment of her fantasies. We are already familiar
with Esther’s “native capability for discerning that the sense of ranks and
degrees has its repulsions,” but now she notices other repulsions, including
“this test: she herself had no sense of inferiority and just subjection when she
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was with Harold Transome; there were even points in him for which she felt
a touch, not of angry, but of playful scom; whereas with Felix she had always
a sense of dependence and possible humiliation” (522-23). If a woman’s “lot
is made for her by the love she accepts” (525), if that is the narrative logic
that will construct the moral meaning of her “story,” then Esther’s
discernment has already chosen for her:
It was difficult by any theory of providence, or consideration of
results, to see a course which she could call duty: if something would
come and urge itself strongly as pleasure, and save her from the effort
to find a clue of principle amid the labrynthine confusions of right and
possession, the promise could not but seem alluring. (524)
Esther is open to letting her senses decide, letting “pleasure” override or
replace thought. But even the judgment of her senses is now on the side,
though in an obscure way, of principle. Her “intellectual intentions” will
soon agree with her aesthetic judgment.
Felix and Esther: Shared Visions of Beauty
If we were looking for a parallel in Eliot’s novel to Ruskin’s non-
ornamental beauty, or to his great civic building in contrast to the papists’
temple, we might find it in Felix Holt. Felix calls the “best life” the one
“where one bears and does everything because of some great and strong
feeling—so that this and that in one’s circumstances don’t signify” (356).
Felix links action to feeling and feeling to action. There is a unity of being in
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Felix that is connected to his appearance as well—a unity generally expected
more from women than from men. Felix’s intentions gives his face “the look
of the habitual meditative abstraction from objects of mere personal vanity or
desire, which is the peculiar stamp of culture, and makes a very roughly- cut
face worthy to be called ‘the human face divine’” (398). Such a face is that
“rudest work that tells a story or records a fact” which is “better” than “the
richest without meaning” (Ruskin 8: 230). But here the gender difference
becomes more clear—like the building Ruskin alludes to, his face has “the
peculiar stamp of culture” rather than the very sexually-complicit loveliness
of the unaware woman. A woman’s lack of vanity is rarely attributed to her
exposure to “culture.”
This somewhat feminine masculinity is reinforced by Felix’s
approach to work. His ethic of work has a traditionally feminine cast:
’Not to waste energy, to apply force where it would tell, to do small
work close at hand, not waiting for the speculative chances of
heroism, but preparing for them’—these were the rules he had been
constantly urging on himself. (393)
The distinction between the sexes is perhaps not so great if the work of men
should be guided by such feminine values: small, close, non-heroic. Indeed,
these terms might all describe the intellectual intentions of the masons or
other laborers working on that great civic building. In a foreshadowing of
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Dorothea Brooke, Felix describes how he could achieve a life based upon
such values:
And the finest fellow of all would be the one who could be glad to
have lived because the world was chiefly miserable, and his life had
come to help some one who needed it. He would be the man who had
the most powers and the fewest selfish wants. (361)
The more “miserable” the world, the more good a good person can do. But
“outward conditions” conspire against even the most committed visionary:
As Dorothea laments the lack of charitable work available in her small
village, so Felix admits that “I am not up to the level of what I see to be the
best. I’m often a hungry discontented fellow” (361).
Eliot associates this vision of life with political criticism through her
hero rather than her heroine—perhaps because a male can do so without
falling prey to the dreaded overtones of sainthood as Dinah Morris and
Dorothea Brooke too frequently do. For a man to notice such things anchors
the desire for change in the “real” world (practically and ideologically) in
ways that it is more difficult for a female to do. For instance, Felix as a male
participating directly in the body politic, is able to take on capitalist
apologetic rhetoric with some authority:
I ... choose to withdraw myself from the push and scramble after
money and position. Any man is at liberty to call me a fool, and say
that mankind are benefited by the push and scramble in the long-run.
But I care for the people who live now and will not be living when the
long-run comes. As it is, I prefer going shares with the unlucky. (362)
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The condition that makes good men as good as they can be is the current one,
the “now,” if one has the wit to resist the redirection of the political
economists. Perhaps her association of Felix with feminine values eases
Eliot’s discomfort with keeping such political authority out of her heroine’s
hands.
Since Felix takes this role, and since, practically speaking, he is able
to do it so well, Eliot leaves Esther with the subordinate role of “helping” the
world’s helper—the one who will inspire and influence him in his active
work in the world. This role marks her partial return to ornament: her beauty
in such a case is once again more important than her character, than her work
(though now it is a “true” beauty rather than a misleading one). In any case,
it is her beauty that gives her character and her work any power at all. Such
power, though, is not as great as we might expect from the rhetoric describing
it. Esther’s greatest moment of womanly influence in the novel is her public
appearance at Felix’s trial. During the trial, she is more aware of Felix than
herself, and in fact, the contrast between Felix and the other men is partly
what drives her to testify to his character. As expected, her pure and noble
feeling is contrasted to their hardened experience; her vision to their habits
(570-1). Her beauty, unselfish and unself-conscious, is noted by the
spectators, though it only “seemed. . . like a toy or ornament,” but her
speech, and the feeling behind it, proves that it is a better beauty, a beauty
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that draws its influences from “the depth below” that surface which had been
“sleeping” (573). Esther’s newly refurbished character can only enhance the
messages that her physical self already communicates. As expected, Esther
cannot influence the law, which “saw with severity” (574), but she does
influence “the magistrates and other country gentlemen”: “some of the
necessary impulse might have been lacking but for the stirring of the heart in
certain just-spirited men and good fathers among them, which had been
raised to a high pitch of emotion by Esther’s maidenly fervour” (575). As
Harold later says, “you made all the men wish what you wished” (589). In
her moment of triumph, Esther’s influence persuades men to share her vision,
if only partially and temporarily.
Such public influence, as touching as it is, is very limited. The more
practical kind of influence as presented in this novel is the influence between
two people as constructed in the narrower realm of the heterosexual couple.
Felix makes the case for the importance of a certain type of woman to a
man’s moral ambition. He has a decided preference for the “natural,” and the
embellishment of women is an “art” that he does not appreciate, most likely
because of his strong class-consciousness. To Felix it is clear how important
women are to a man’s class and to his struggle with class:
I will never marry, though I should have to live on raw turnips to
subdue my flesh. I’ll never look back and say, “I had a fine purpose
once—I meant to keep my hands clean, and my soul upright, and to
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look the truth in the face; but pray excuse me, I have a wife and
children—I must lie and simper a little, else they’ll starve!” or, “My
wife is nice, she must have her bread well buttered, and her feelings
will be hurt if she is not thought genteel.” That is the lot Miss Esther
is preparing for some man or other. (156)
Unlike Lydgate in Middlemarch, Felix realizes before marriage that a married
man has practical and social considerations: he must consider money or status
or both as more important than any “fine purpose” that might be separate
from these, or in active opposition to them. Because the union of a man to a
woman and to her children is an economic act, it tends to tie husbands to the
status quo out of self-interest.
Eliot depicts Felix’s initial dislike of Esther as the result of his
suspicion of woman’s ornamental beauty. His first reading of her founders in
a tangle of class and aesthetic prejudice:
The minister’s daughter was not the sort of person he expected. She
was quite incongruous with his notion of minister’s daughters in
general; and though he had expected something nowise delightful, the
incongruity repelled him. A very delicate scent, the faint suggestion
of a garden, was wafted as she went. He would not observe her; but
he had a sense of an elastic walk; the tread of small feet, a long neck,
and a high crown of shining brown plaits with curls that floated
backward—things, in short, that suggested a fine lady to him, and
• determined him to notice her as little as possible. A fine lady was
always a sort of spun-glass affair—not natural, and with no beauty for
him as art; but a fine lady as the daughter of this rusty old Puritan was
especially offensive. (148-9)
Esther “repels” him. He responds to her on a physical level. Indeed it seems
that his own taste is offended. But that taste is responding as much to his
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interpretation of her physicality, to the signs of a “fine lady,” as to the
physical details themselves. Indeed, that reading is much stronger than his
vision, for he “would not observe her”—a sign of a preprocessed assessment
as well as a classic romantic hint of repressed physical attraction. He is
aware of a class preference for small feet, long necks, and floating curls. And
everyone, expect perhaps Mr. Lyon, is aware of a class bias in favor of those
attributes. The easy condemnation of them and of Esther’s open pride in
them, however, is thrown into some doubt by, in this case, their naturalness.
Esther can change neither her feet nor her neck, while even her curls are
natural. Hiding or containing her physical gifts would be as perverse,
perhaps, as intentionally exposing them. These “ornaments” are part of her
substance; they are not fabricated additions. The evaluation of feminine
beauty is ambiguous and complex—misogyny is as entwined in such an
assessment as Ruskin’s Protestantism is in his critique of Catholic
architecture. During Esther and Felix’s first serious discussion of values,
when she is focused not on her appearance but upon his seemingly negative
thoughts of her there is a moment that casts the moral evaluation of beauty
into further dimness: As they talk, Esther stands
as she is wont with one foot on the fender, and looking at the fire. If
it had been any one but Felix who was near her, it might have
occurred to her that this attitude put her to advantage; but she had
only a mortified sense that he was quite indifferent to what others
praised her for. (209-10)
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In this moment she is unaware of her beauty, yet she still shows “to
advantage,” proving in that novelistic way that her beauty is a true one. It
works without artifice; it works even without her intention, at least in that
moment, although that useful “stance” is a habitual one, and that habit was
formed through an earlier awareness.
His rejection of Esther is based, not just upon [class] repulsion, but
upon his theory of feminine influence. He complains to Esther: “You have
enough understanding to make it wicked that you should add one more to the
women who hinder men’s lives from having any nobleness in them” (209).
When he implies his superiority by claiming that he should “sink” himself
“by doing what I don’t recognise as the best,” she counters with a little wit: “I
understand... .1 am a lower kind of being, and could not so easily sink
myself.” To this flirtatious or at least facile comment, he replies,
Not by entering your father’s ideas. If a woman really believes
herself to be a lower kind of being, she should place herself in
subjection: she should be ruled by the thoughts of her father or
husband. If not, let her show her power of choosing something better.
You must know that your father’s principles are greater and worthier
than what guides your life. You have no reason but idle fancy and
selfish inclination for shirking his teaching and giving your soul up to
trifles. (210)
Felix avoids giving her the flattery that her reply asks for, instead answering
the question seriously, in his own terms, or, in the terms of a world concerned
with greater issues than flirtation. For if Esther or any woman is truly
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concerned with living a moral life, she has the choice to do something about
it: she is not forced into apathy or apology. Although one option is clearly, to
us, a sexist one, Felix’s belief that her father or husband may actually know
better than she does, the second option is equally clearly his true challenge:
Esther is capable of assessing her father’s principles and her own and of
choosing his or some even better than those she follows now. Eliot, through
Felix, and through this rather condescending conversation, is making her
argument clear: women have the ability and the duty to choose moral work.
The reason why this choice is necessary is that women are not merely
independent individuals, for “men can’t help loving them, and so they make
themselves slaves to the petty desires of petty creatures... .All life is stunted
to their littleness” (212). Because men are set to please women, Felix seems
to be saying, it is women who set the moral level of society.
If woman’s and man’s understanding of her beauty’s “intellectual
intentions” agree, then they together create a moral world in which those
intentions reign. Felix describes his ideal of feminine beauty in terms that
recall Ruskin’s unease with the “intentions” of the Papists’ temples. When
Felix tells Esther, “You are very beautiful,” she knows not to take his words
at face value: she looks at him
to see whether his face would give some help to the interpretation of
this novel speech. He was looking at her quite calmly, very much as a
reverential Protestant might look at a picture of the Virgin, with a
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devoutness suggested by the type rather than the image. Esther’s
vanity was not in the least gratified: she felt that, somehow or other,
Felix was going to reprimand her.
The form, the image, is not trustworthy, but what he can make the image
mean is, as we see in his words:
I wonder . . . whether the subtle measuring of forces will ever come to
measuring the force there would be in one beautiful woman whose
mind was as noble as her face was beautiful—who made a man’s
passion for her rush in one current with all the great aims of his life.
(364)
He is seeing her form and not the inner effort that implies that she is reaching
that state. But he is also imagining a cultural science which could measure
the “forces” of women’s beauty and character. Like that young reverential
Protestant, Ruskin, imaginatively removing distracting ornament from the
catholic churches in order to reveal “what is good or great in their buildings,”
Felix has taken the Virgin and substituted his own ideal, a beautiful woman,
as good as she is lovely, who would exist in the world as a physical being.
He is imagining relationships, those that include physical “passion,” between
living individuals rather than those between man and a real or imagined
divine spirit. Angels of this world rather than of the next. The unity of this
ideal woman’s character and appearance, her Ruskinian beauty, would not
only mesh well with his ideal way of living, but would prod and symbolize it
at once: woman can represent that “one current” as well as exist practically as
part of it.
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Eliot’s narrative confirms Felix’s position through her representation
of the aesthetic power of feminine virtue. Once Esther begins to think, her
appearance becomes more powerful: “she looked unusually charming to-day,
from the very fact that she was not vividly conscious of anything but of
having a mind near her that asked her to be something better than she actually
was.” Some of this aesthetic improvement can be put down to her meeting
certain expectations: “the consciousness of her own superiority amongst the
people around her was superseded, and even a few brief weeks had given a
softened expression to her eyes, a more feminine beseechingness and self
doubt to her manners”—she is now more conventionally feminine, softer, and
less sure of her self. But a new aggression, most likely as “charming” as her
new softness, is also hinted at: “Perhaps, however, a little new defiance was
rising in place of the old contempt—a defiance of the Trebian views
concerning Felix Holt” (338). While we can explain Eliot’s championing of
a more consciously and consistently moral life on pragmatic grounds, her
invocation of aesthetics here places such a moral choice in the realm of the
natural—a good woman of this type is made more attractive by her moral
efforts. This is one of those moments where Eliot comes very close to
Ruskin’s romantic belief in beauty, implying that Esther’s inner life is
coming to match her outer appearance, to the greater effectiveness of both—a
culmination that she does not allow Hetty Sorrel or Rosamond Lydgate.
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Esther becomes less an ornament and more a true beauty as she becomes a
necessary part of the world-as-it-should-be instead of a supplement to the
world-as-it-is.
Felix has a vision of Esther as she could and should be. It is one of
the powers of such visions, in an Eliot novel at least, that they may have an
effect on the world as it is. Due to the attraction between them, and to
Esther’s inherent potential, the novel tells us, Esther should be able somehow
to match his vision of her, and to thus set her aesthetic power to work freely.
It is an interesting pattern that many of Eliot’s couples feature the men
“educating” the women, at least at first, or should I say, in the body of the
novel—their lives after the novels’ crises seem to conform to the more usual
stereotype. The effect of Felix’s influence on Esther is complex: at one point,
the
former Byronic heroes were beginning to look something like last
night’s decorations seen in the sober dawn. So fast does a little
leaven spread within us—so incalculable is the effect of one
personality on another. Behind all Esther’s thoughts, like an
unacknowledged yet constraining presence, there was the sense, that
if Felix Holt were to love her, her life would be exalted into
something quite new—into a sort of difficult blessedness, such as one
may imagine in beings who are conscious of painfully growing into
the possession of higher powers. (327)
The effect of this interpersonal education seems at first to focus simply on the
self, to change that self. But his love would “exalt” her life in a strange kind
of Cinderella twist. She would not be lifted above her class in being made a
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Princess, but she would be lifted above her class, in a moral sense, by
becoming the sort of woman he would choose. His choice would, in a way,
be the sign of her exaltation rather than the immediate source of it. For she,
too, would have to choose the “difficult blessedness” that is demanded of
these good women.
The relationship between Esther and Felix is an aesthetic one. Esther
makes it clear that she demands more of him than mere guidance: “It is
difficult for a woman ever try to be anything good when she is not believed
in—when it is always supposed that she must be contemptible” (365?). To
her pointing out that women are often not offered such a role in life, she now
adds the need to be “believed in.” Eliot’s construction of feminine beauty
and its influence demands, to a certain extent, a mutual reading of her moral
being and a mutual belief in the role that that being gives her. For a man who
wishes to improve the world in a political (moral) way, his woman must be a
partner in his aesthetic vision. In choosing the “good” man, Esther chooses
his interpretation of the world, including his vision of her. To share his life is
knowingly to become one kind of aesthetic object rather than another (beauty
vs. ornament). In a way, the sharing of his vision (of the world, of herself) is
the creation or the embodiment of the beautiful soul—it is this choice or
agreement that makes her mind “noble.” In these circumstances, the noble
woman’s mind is still explicitly gendered, especially concerning her
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perception of self. That mind is also dependent upon man’s prior vision.
Both sexes reflect each back to the other: each confirms the validity of the
other’s visions by agreeing to share them.
The beauty that gives woman her greatest chance at communicating
her moral vision is also her greatest handicap. While she may have a healthy
relationship to the world and the people in it, those observing her, and
learning from her, may not have a Ruskinian appreciation of those
relationships. Some will, like Harold Transome, inevitably read her beauty
as ornament, for the “truth” of her moral character will always be a matter of
interpretation, of a private response of the man to the woman he reads.
Woman, thus, cannot really “show” her moral quality with any confidence
that it will be seen. If she cannot display her goodness clearly, then how can
she communicate it? Beauty is relationship, but in Eliot’s world such
connection exists in a sea of isolation. But in this novel, “true” beauty is
really different from that distracting ornamental kind—it offers no detail, no
definition, no outline, just agreement in work, in effort, in relationship, terms
that in comparison to the physical characteristics of visual objects may seem
empty abstractions, but when understood from the perspective of a mason
helping to construct a breathtaking stone arch, they need not have so little
relation to the body, to the world we actually live in. Because such
perspective is so rare, however, Eliot’s picture of moral beauty in the world is
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a strikingly circumscribed one. She foresees few relationships of true
understanding, small coalitions only of people working together to build that
great civic building, a building that some will condemn, or worse, admire, as
an ornamental temple, failing to see “what is really good or great” in their
work.
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Notes
1 In the 1880 edition, these lines are referred to only in a note: “Thirteen lines
of vulgar attack on Roman-Catholicism are here—with much gain to the
chapter’s grace, and purification of its truth—omitted” (8: 4n3). I believe
that it is the attack on the church that is the embarrassing vulgarity; ornament
remains as problematic as ever in the rest of the text.
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Works Cited
Eliot, George. Felix Holt. Ed. Peter Coveney. New York: Penguin, 1972.
Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin. Ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander
Wedderbum. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912
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Chapter Four
Reading Dorothea: The Real v. the Good in Middlemarch
This chapter is not specifically about beauty but about the visionary or
the ideal. In Felix Holt Eliot commended visions but did not linger long on
their genesis or the operations of their influence. Middlemarch in contrast
details the search of its heroine who seeks something like Felix’s guiding
vision, though for her that vision would represent not some hoped-for future
but a complex organic understanding of the present (her vision would be her
“reality”). This endeavor is made more challenging given the conventions of
the realist novel and the expectations of verisimilitude of the readers trained
to read that form. The crux of the novel, then, is its ability to communicate,
even if only momentarily or indirectly, the kind of difference-erasing
sympathy, the kind of transcendent willing-into-being of a better world, that
seems so at odds with its other objectives.
As a woman of intense feeling, Dorothea Brooke is at odds with her
own novel—with Middlemarch as well as Middlemarch. Eliot’s
representation of the heroine of what many call her most accomplished realist
novel is complicated by its concern with two interpretive problems: the
questions of how Dorothea reads the world and of how we are to read her.
The first is a major theme of the novel; the second is the end result of a
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variety of narrative proddings of our own judgment. That judgment is
equally complex, concerning both the moral question of what is moral or
“good” to do or to be and our “pragmatic” sense of what is “real” or possible
to be in the world as we know it. It is not, surprisingly, difficult in this case
to get a handle on how much feeling is “too much.” In a central scene
directly addressing our capacity for feeling, the narrator describes Dorothea’s
newly-wedded distress:
Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea’s was anything very
exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among
incongruities and left to ‘find their feet’ among them, while their
elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs
Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her
wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some
discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which
replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to
be deeply moved by what is not unusual.
The narrator asks us to observe Dorothea in the context of a wider humanity,
with the seeming intent to put her suffering into “perspective”—that
pragmatic move toward moderation of feeling. We are reminded that her
feelings are not “anything very exceptional,” a belittling of Dorothea only
enhanced by the explanation that she is one of “many souls in their young
nudity,” who are like “tumbling” children learning to walk “while their elders
go about their business.” Nor, if we wish to gain the approval of this worldly
wise voice should we read her “fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding”
as “tragic.” The warnings against overestimating Dorothea’s suffering begin
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to fail with the wry observation that “we do not expect people to be deeply
moved by what is not unusual.” The narrator has moved from an implied “I”
speaking to “you,” the reader, to an observation about “we.” The distance
that was forced on Dorothea is now applied to those viewing her, including
the speaker and the reader, and the results are as ironic, as ambiguous, and as
subtly chilling. This attitude is now linked to those who avoid “feeling too
much,” not out of some “natural” sense of the balance of things, but out of a
fear of experiencing such emotion. The narrator next gives a “natural”
explanation for such incapacity (one having nothing to do with happy
moderation or proper perspective):
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of its frequency,
has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and
perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen
vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing
the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that
roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us
walk about well wadded with stupidity. (194)
This “scientific” observation of the history of mankind’s “coarse emotion” is
damning. The speaker has now pulled the rug out from under those who
were seduced by his wise approval of “appropriate” levels of feeling. Now
we hear that there is “tragedy” here, but it is a tragedy that “has not yet
wrought itself’ into the abilities of the human race because the pain of it “lies
in the very fact of its frequency.” Thus, we are not being chided for not
feeling for Dorothea in particular, but for not feeling the pain of all such
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sufferers through her. We are being asked in this moment to imagine, if we
can, feeling that pain, an achievement that, if possible, would turn the
complacency of the initial broad vision to a terrifically powerful sympathy.
The speaker allows us some excuse, if we wish to take it: “and perhaps our
frames could hardly bear much of it.” Perhaps it is not the fault of our
emotion, our sympathy, but of our bodies. We are not strong enough to bear
“a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life”; we could not bear to
hear “the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat.” We cannot bear it
because “we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
The “quickest of us,” those of use most “quick,” perhaps, in our sense of self-
preservation, “walk about well wadded with stupidity.” This stupidity is the
dullness of the senses, but it is also a willed dullness, a carefulness to be
“well-wadded” against the roar.
If the moral sense is like a sixth physical sense, then Middlemarch is a
novel about how people try to muffle or to blind it, blocking its perceptions
or reinterpreting them so that they do not “see” what they otherwise might. If
our senses tell us what is “real” in or about the world, then that moral sense
might be said to tell us what is “morally real.” Like those other senses, or
perhaps even more insidiously, the moral sense can be manipulated, or even
ignored. The information that the moral sense conveys to us, our approbation
or our disapproval, has no very clear one-to-one reference in the material
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world: those responses may be strong enough, but what they are in response
to is unclear. They depend upon how we reinterpret what we feel (through
the stories we tell about such feelings, the stories we tell about what prompts
them), or how we subdue those feelings altogether.
If one common goal of a realist novel is to communicate a moral
vision, and if that vision is dependent upon our shifting interpretations of our
own moral responses, then any communication of that vision will be a
challenge. The realist novel is bound by detail, by the description of material
life and by the need to communicate the extraordinary through ordinary,
everyday, common standards of what is “real.” Within that framework, its
equally important moral mission, to teach sympathy, will be especially
difficult. For the teaching of sympathetic responsiveness relies not solely on
representing a sympathetic scene, but of encouraging a generous
physiological response to it—one for which our very “frames,” perhaps, are
ill-equipped. What is the “right” reading of the world when the conventions
of realism lead you to reading incorrectly? When the generic limitations of
the novel are complicit with the biological limitations of the reader’s body?
Dorothea herself reads against those limitations as well as she is able, and her
novel at times asks us to read her against them as well.
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The Evils of Reading “Well”
John Ruskin’s faces a similar dilemma: how to communicate his
vision of sympathy through language used very differently by his audience.
In his 1865 lecture, “Of Queens’ Gardens,” Ruskin presents a vision of the
world in which women’s moral judgment, based upon their unique ability to
“feel” the pain of the world, will act as the basis for that world’s moral and
social “healing”—a very powerful aesthetic. In a new preface to the lecture
in 1871, the same year Middlemarch began publication, Ruskin’s message to
girls, which one would assume was intended as advice for them in
preparation for becoming those powerful Queens, lays out a strikingly
circumscribed program of daily practice. The lecture itself is an idealized
portrait of women who possess the power magically to influence those
around them. The preface, in contrast, is practical advice to girls on how to
improve themselves. Ruskin runs into the problem of representing the
visionary: in giving that more straight-forward advice, he strips the idealistic
power from the vision of feminine influence as represented in the lecture. The
differences in tone and approach leave the impression of a startling
disjunction between the imaginative, impassioned, idealizing rhetoric of the
lecture and the practical and patronizing advice in the Preface, creating a
disjunction between his idealized England as a Garden and the actual room
and communities inhabited by these young girls. The pragmatism of the
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preface’s message may merely act as a corrective to the lecture’s lack of
pedagogical detail, but the change leaves him open to the charge that the
actions promoted in the visionary Garden (women acting as moral judges or
critics) just do not work in the actual world of everyday labor.
The lecture poses the same problem of comprehension as does
Dorothea: we can dismiss it for its idealistic naivete or we can read it as
somehow existing outside pragmatic language and its references. How we
respond to the latter would depend upon how we judge the potential of the
unconventional. Though it is written in less idealistic language, the 1871
Preface explicitly warns against conventional readings of the world, sharing
with Eliot’s novel a concern about that muffling of feeling. Ruskin’s
proscription of the study of religion or theology for women is based upon just
this concern. The 1871 Preface clarifies the danger of this area of knowledge
as lying in the inhibiting power of overdetermining narratives. In part, it is a
question of narratives in conflict, with the resulting paranoia of never being
certain which one to believe. But more importantly, Ruskin condemns much
conventional religious narrative as encouraging and validating the
containment of sympathetic feeling. In an amazing parable, Ruskin details
how a girl’s own sense of thankfulness to God can betray her:
You have, then, I suppose, good food, pretty rooms to live in, pretty
dresses to wear, power of retaining every rational and wholesome
pleasure; you are, moreover, probably gentle and grateful, and in the
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habit of every day thanking God for these things. But why do you
thank Him? Is it because, in these matters, as well as in your religious
knowledge, you think he has made a favourite of you? Is the essential
meaning of your thanksgiving, “Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as
other girls are, not in that I fast twice in the week while they feast, but
in that I feast seven times a week while they fast,” and are you quite
sure this is a pleasing form of thanksgiving to your Heavenly Father?
Suppose you saw one of your own true earthly sisters, Lucy or Emily,
cast out of your mortal father’s house, starving, helpless, heartbroken;
and that every morning when you went into your father’s room, you
said to him, “How good you are, father, to give me what you don’t
give Lucy,” are you sure that, whatever anger your parent might have
just cause for, against your sister, he would be pleased by that
thanksgiving, or flattered by that praise? Nay, are you even sure that
you are so much the favourite?—suppose that, all this while, he loves
poor Lucy just as well as you, and is only trying you through her pain,
and perhaps not angry with her in anywise, but deeply angry with
you, and all the more for your thanksgivings? (18: 43-44)
It is not for a girl to assume that she knows God’s plans or his judgments—
she cannot know divine signs, but must instead interpret the flow of events
according to a human standard, her own moral sense, understood to be an
inborn physical thing.1 To claim knowledge of any more extensive narrative
is, of course, a sign of arrogance, and this passage serves principally to
puncture the complacency of bourgeois self-satisfaction. But what is
disturbing here is the way in which Ruskin seems to throw into doubt the
authority of any particular narrative at all. The patronizing story of Lucy,
Emily, and their earthly father is obviously intended as a corrective to his
audience’s misreadings—no father would appreciate gratitude and love on
such terms. But it is not so simple. For perhaps the girl’s own father has
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himself taught her such complacency. Even more perplexing is the sense that
Ruskin himself is assuming something like the perspective of God, or at least
of master-narrator. Whose narrative is the girl to trust? Her own father’s
(that figure standing in for the perspective of her family or community or
class)? Ruskin’s (standing in for a greater social authority? For divine
wisdom itself?)? Though Ruskin might intend to quash the young girl’s
arrogance in order to set her on the correct interpretive path, the message of
the passage is more complicated than that. In calling her attention to a
variety of interpretations, amongst which she could choose, and in so doing
could risk error, the parable suggests that the safe thing would be for the girl
to refuse any overarching narrative at all.
An earlier passage makes clear the object of this particular attack. For
Ruskin, a kind of moral blindness is thoroughly rooted in accepting the
contemporary culture’s apologist and misleading religious doctrine or
narrative, one that has a particular sense of reading “well”:
Of course we are ignorant and blind creatures, and we cannot know
what seeds of good may be in present suffering, or present crime; but
with what we cannot know we are not concerned. It is conceivable
that murderers or liars may in some distant world be exalted into a
higher humanity than they could have reached without homicide or
falsehood; but the contingency is not one by which our actions should
be guided. There is, indeed, a better hope that the beggar, who lies at
our gates in misery, may, within gates of pearl, be comforted; but the
Master, whose words are our only authority for thinking so, never
Himself inflicted disease as a blessing, nor sent away the hungry
unfed, or the wounded unhealed. (18: 41)
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There is a particular story there that Ruskin wishes to invalidate—those
narratives in which it is assumed that those who commit evil in the present do
so according to some greater plan, and as such can be safely left alone. Such
a narrative imagines the story continuing beyond the present moment, on to
an otherworldly ending contradictory to its earthly beginnings, those
available to our eyes. Even though such stories are “conceivable,” we should
not base our actions on such facility of imagination. Instead, if we must
engage with narrative at all, we must be content with the narratives that
operate completely in this world. The only story that Ruskin approves serves
to make his point: the beggar may be comforted in Heaven, but such a hope,
and hope is all it is, at least coincides with the actions of “the Master” who,
while He lived on the earth, never “sent away the hungry unfed, or the
wounded unhealed.” Beggars may receive mercy for their suffering, but
murders and liars will most likely not be rewarded for the suffering they
cause others.
Ruskin is arguing a theory of doing based upon a specialized mode of
reading: girls must read the world in the correct way before they can respond
appropriately to it, but they must not read according to a preconceived,
overarching narrative. In making this case, the Preface clarifies the lecture’s
promise that “feeling” can lead to the “healing” of the world. As opposed to
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reading “well” or according to some socially approved grand narrative, the
girl finds her knowledge of the world in her feelings about it. Her reading of
the world is aesthetic—her senses, not her education, are her guide:
Believe me then, the only right principle of action here is to consider
good and evil as defined by our natural senses of both; and to strive to
promote the one, and to conquer the other, with as hearty endeavor as
if there were, indeed, no other world than this.. . .but unless you are
deliberately kind to every creature, you will often be cruel to many.
Cruel, partly through want of imagination, (a far rarer and weaker
faculty in women than men) and yet more, at the present day, through
the subtle encouragement of your selfishness by the religious doctrine
that all which we now suppose to be evil will be brought to a good
end; doctrine practically issuing, not in less earnest efforts that the
immediate unpleasantness may be averted from ourselves, but in our
remaining satisfied in the contemplation of its ultimate objects, when
it is inflicted on others. (18: 42, 41)
This warning against assuming that one knows God’s judgments, his
narratives of suffering and blessing, is a complicated one. Neither girls, nor
women, are to take the position of God, seeing the “ultimate good” or
“purpose” in suffering. Such a perspective is not available. But such seeing
is also simply not her job, and pursuing it can even act to prevent her from
doing her proper job. She is not to see that “meta-narrative” (even if she
could), because that would take her out of the story, it would give her an
excuse (whether consciously or not) not to act. So, she should not “read” the
suffering of the world as if she were by the shoulder of the writer of it.
Instead she should read the world with her body as a participant in its story.
As such, the girl should practice trusting her own natural senses (her
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responses of pleasure and pain) and the patterns of good and evil they point
out for her, rather than trusting any reasoned theory that prevents her from
feeling those responses or that contradicts what her own moral sense tells her.
In addition, she should deliberately act to support and propagate the “correct”
narrative in the only way she can, which is quite small—to always be kind, to
always give the effect of pleasure rather than pain in her practical response to
the emotional catalysts of the flow of events within which she exists.
For Ruskin, the limitations of contemporary feeling are a matter not
of the body, of the capacity of our “frames” to beat it, but of the narratives
about feeling that get in the way. Ruskin shows absolute faith in the body,
demanding of women’s bodies in particular, “it is only you who can feel the
depths of pain, and conceive the way of its healing.” Unlike Eliot’s claim
that “we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence,” that
silence between every beings’ body, Ruskin argues that it is only our
imaginations that have been stunted. “Of Queens’ Gardens” is his attempt to
reverse that damage. Eliot is not so confident that the any grand healing can
take place, especially not through a narrow focus on the education of middle-
class girls. Indeed, her reading of her heroine’s options seems like a cynical
expose of Ruskin’s own advice to his young readers. Like Ruskin, she
condemns the “world” for not recognizing spiritual character, and replacing it
with its own narrative of feminine spiritual life. As Eliot mockingly puts it:
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What could she do, what ought she to do?—she, hardly more than a
budding woman, but yet with an active conscience and a great mental
need, not to be satisfied by a girlish instruction comparable to the
nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse. With some
endowment of stupidity and conceit, she might have thought that a
Christian young lady of fortune should find her ideal of life in village
charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the perusal of Female
Scripture Characters, unfolding the private experience of Sara under
the Old Dispensation, and Dorcus under the New, and the care of her
soul over her embroidery in her own boudoir—with a background of
prospective marriage to a man who, if less strict than herself in being
involved in affairs religiously inexplicable, might be prayed for and
seasonably exhorted. Form such contentment poor Dorothea was shut
out. (28)
Dorothea is in a position similar to Ruskin’s girl readers, except perhaps that
she has passed the stage when his limited advice would be satisfactory. The
“girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive
mouse” may have prepared her for a shallow spiritual life, if she had been
“stupid” and “conceited” enough. That life, or the attitude that would accept
it, seems, on the one hand, to be exactly what Ruskin derided in his preface:
the “ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the
perusal of Female Scripture Characters, unfolding the private experience of
Sara under the Old Dispensation, Dorcus under the New, and the care of her
soul over her embroidery in her own boudoir.” Ruskin would agree with the
narrator here that this life is hardly “ideal,” especially in the complacency
implied in the term, “a Christian young lady,” with all its satisfaction in being
of the correct religion and class, and with its “patronage of the humbler
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clergy” and “village charities” as easily read as social activity as spiritual.
Even with the ironic shading of the narrator’s tone, however, the actual
activities this young Christian paragon pursues are disturbingly close to
Ruskin’s recommendations for girls: they perform charity and they read.
This passage constructs both activities in a certain constricting way (as pre
digested or otherwise controlled by others), but they are the same activity.
This life is that of an unquestioning following of limited sympathetic
prompting, or, in other words, a life that contains those sympathetic
promptings. The “world” reads spiritual life in a containing “normative”
way.
For Eliot, such regulation manifests itself in what would supposedly
be the final stage for women, the adult life of the “Queenly” lady. But
Ruskin’s vision of a femininity that will heal “the pains of the world” can
find no echo in these “prospective marriages” where the wives will excuse
their husbands as “less strict” than themselves spiritually or morally since
they view as cold fact their being “involved in affairs religiously
inexplicable.” This idea of men’s work “in the rough world” excuses men
from moral feeling or following, rather than being a sign of the real work to
be done in the English household: the reformation of the English husband.
Even if they were to recognize the need, however, their remedy (that kind of
husband, if he happens to be yours, “might be prayed for and seasonably
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exhorted”) hardly inspires hope. In other words, female moral influence is
reduced to prayer to another male (God) while “exhortation” is regulated
according to the spiritual season.
Dorothea Reading
Dorothea’s narrator has obviously distanced herself from the
“stupidity” and “conceit” of girls who would be satisfied with such a life,
girls who read the world in a “worldly” way even while claiming spiritual
and moral superiority. Eliot presents the central issue for Dorothea as
reading, and in the novel we are provided many scenes of her doing so—
incorrectly, correctly, extremely, blindly—but that reading is presented in
such a way that it throws such judgments of her ability, the judgments the
author is asking us to make, into question. Dorothea is not that “Christian
young lady” precisely because she cannot read so “well” as that girl does.
Instead, she is presented as “oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in
her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life
greatly effective.” This “indefiniteness” is a real confusion on Dorothea’s
part, but she is not helped by the fact that others have claimed the metaphor
of sight. She is attempting to read “theoretically,” with her moral sense in
addition to her other senses. Dorothea’s blindness, her inability to read the
world as the world would like, is a kind of resistance to the “good” readers
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that Eliot and Ruskin abhor. She is in search of her own understanding of
reality—her own aesthetic vision.
Dorothea’s difficulty in relating to the world around her is often
described as either a simple blindness or a tendency not to look about her. In
an early moment, the narrator’s description of her expression is reminiscent
of Adam Bede’s Dinah Morris:
But there was nothing of an ascetic’s expression in her bright full
eyes, as she looked before her, not consciously seeing, but absorbing
into the intensity of her mood, the solemn glory of the afternoon with
its long swathes of light between the far-off rows of limes, whose
shadows touched each other. (27)
Dorothea often isn’t even looking at the world; instead she is “absorbing”
impressions in some other way directly into her emotions. But the inability
to see is much more significant than this seeming inattention. Sir James
compliments her on her ability to “discriminate” between “sense and
nonsense.” Dorothea replies, “On the contrary, I am often unable to decide.
But that is from ignorance. The right conclusion is there all the same, though
I am unable to see it” (31). She herself claims an inability to see, but here it
is not the world or even the world’s reading that she is looking for. We see
the contrast with Celia’s opinion of such precision: “As to Dorothea, it had
always been her way to find something wrong in her sister’s words, though
Celia inwardly protested that she always said just how things were, and
nothing else” (46). Celia reads the world in a pragmatic, non-metaphysical
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way, the way that has made a claim to “just how things” are, “and nothing
else”—the claim of Realism. Celia claims clear and complete sight, while
Dorothea, by finding “something wrong” with Celia’s vision, signals some
mysteriously different thing (to the world, to Celia), perhaps another world
altogether. Celia finds in Dorothea’s inability to see a cause for concern:
“I see no harm at all in Tantripp’s talking to me. It is better to hear
what people say... .1 thought it right to tell you, because you went on
as you always do, never looking just where you are, and treading in
the wrong place. You always see what nobody else sees; it is
impossible to satisfy you; yet you never see what is quite plain.
That’s your way, Dodo.”. . .Who can tell what just criticisms Murr the
Cat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation? (36)
Dorothea objects to the gossip of the servant, Tantripp, in part because she
objects to such “common” knowledge. But to Celia, that information is part
and parcel of “looking just where you are.” Celia would agree that such
neighbors exist to keep one from “treading in the wrong place.” The result of
Dorothea’s ability to see something more than “what is quite plain,” is to
make her, in Celia’s eyes, “impossible to satisfy.” Dorothea’s difficulty in
relating to the world she lives in makes it frustrating for that world to deal
with her.
Not that Dorothea is by any means clearly right. Dorothea’s most
obvious instance of “treading in the wrong place” is her marriage to Mr.
Casaubon where her mistake is partially a result of her blindness to certain
“worldly” things. One key moment is her inability to read his letter:
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How could it occur to her to examine the letter, to look at is critically
as a profession of love? Her whole soul was possessed by the fact
that a fuller life was opening before her: she was a neophyte about to
enter on a higher grade of initiation. She was going to have room for
the energies which stirred uneasily under the dimness and pressure of
her own ignorance and the petty peremptoriness of the world’s habits.
(44)
Because she has not listened to the world’s advice in matters matrimonial
(“She was not in the least teaching Mr Casaubon to ask if he were good
enough for her, but merely asking herself anxiously if she could be good
enough for Mr Casaubon” (51)), she cannot see the “shallowness” of his
feeling for her. But her mistake is not complete blindness, for she does see
something: “Here was a man who could understand the higher inward life,
and with whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could
illuminate principle with the widest knowledge: a man whose learning almost
amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!” Dorothea sees what she
believes Mr Casaubon can see: a “higher,” clearer vision of life, a man who
could “illuminate principle with the widest knowledge,” a man who could
“see” and help her to see the workings of “principle” that are cloudy to her
now. However, the narrator damns Dorothea’s hopes here with faint
sympathy:
Dorothea’s inferences may seem large; but really life could never
have gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of
conclusion, which has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of
civilization. Has anyone ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the
cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship? (22)
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The narrator draws a comparison between Dorothea’s misreading of her
suitor to all those other kinds of misreadings possible, yet left to our own
imagination. Supposedly we are to sympathize with Dorothea as a fellow
erring creature, but the very comparison makes her seem almost ridiculous:
Dorothea’s “inferences” are vaster than “large.” Once again, Dorothea stands
out from the crowd, perhaps in a way unintended by her creator.
In some ways, Dorothea’s blindness is the result of a kind of
solipsism. Dorothea “sees” an unworldiness in Mr Casaubon that is the echo
of her own:
Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoirs of
Mr Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine
extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her
own experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his
great work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent. (24)
The mind she imagines she sees is both a reflection of her own and an
improvement upon it. So her mind is reflecting something at least partially
“real”: a vision of the world based upon her own moral promptings With the
hope of leaning on such a mind, she can then read her future: “There had
risen before her the girl’s vision of a possible future for herself to which she
looked forward with trembling hope, and she wanted to wander on in that
visionary future without interruption” (27). Dorothea finds this “visionary”
future world much more attractive than the real one before her eyes. The
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narrator presents this imagining, however, as a “girl’s vision,” which places it
somehow closer to Esther’s Utopian fantasy than to Felix’s “strong visions.”
Why that judgment? Perhaps the slight is due to the self-interestedness of the
fantasy, where she can “wander . . . without interruption” in contrast to
Felix’s dedication to always doing his work. But I think it is more than
that—this fantasy of escape from the “petty peremptoriness of the world’s
habits” is seen by the narrator as a naive, “girlish” hope.
But her difficulty in reading the world is not just the result of self-
centered imaginings on the part of an inexperienced girl. What Dorothea
seeks is not a reflection of her mind, but a felt understanding of the external
world. But such aesthetic reading is complex. She does not want the world
explained to her in “worldly” terms, indeed she might not be capable of
absorbing such an interpretation, at least at this stage of inexperience. We
can see some hints of what she desires in her reactions to art. Reading the
“casts and pictures at the Grange, which her uncle had long ago brought
home from his travels”: “To poor Dorothea these severe classical nudities and
smirking Renaissance-Correggiosities were painfully inexplicable, staring
into the midst of her Puritanic conceptions: she had never been taught how
she could bring them into any sort of relevance with her life” (74). Dorothea
does not have any key to reading this art, at least a key of the sort she needs:
a way to “bring them into any sort of relevance with her life,” a way to read
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them as a part of her world—a problem that Ruskin’s Queens do not appear
to confront. The art is there before her eyes, but it is not part of the world she
lives in, or would like to live in, or would even like to create. For Dorothea,
what is real is what her mind sees, not what her eyes see.
The confusion such idiosyncratic vision leads to is clear in her
experience in Rome. Idealistic vision is no easy route to a virtuous life. To
Dorothea, Rome, “the city of visible history,” is a place “where the past of a
whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral
images and trophies gathered from afar.” Rome poses the same problems for
Dorothea as the souvenirs brought back to England by her uncle. The key to
reading Rome would be knowledge, but a “knowledge which breathes a
growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions
which unite all contrasts.” Rome is fragmented to Dorothea; it is the broken
remnants of a “spiritual” narrative which this “girl who has been brought up
in English and Swiss Puritanism” does not know. Dorothea’s confusion in
Rome is almost tragic. It is figured as yet another “historical contrast,” in
part between the Rome seen by an ignorant and suffering creature and that
other Rome, “the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world” that as a “girl
whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into
principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions
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gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain” a more
informed Dorothea would greatly have benefited from seeing.
Eliot contrasts Dorothea’s failure here with a more egregious one.
Other girls live quite comfortably with the “unintelligible Rome.” But these
girls are “good” readers: they live in that “world” which has pre-digested its
“weight” as a scenic backdrop:
The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs
to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-
foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep
impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst
of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded
seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from
reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling
on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms show marble
eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this
vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed
confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation,
at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves
on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which
check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took
possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory
even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange
associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are
apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the
magic-lantem pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull
forlomness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St
Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the
amplitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the
mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for
Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.
(193-194)
Dorothea can’t read the fragments of the city, of the past, as mere ornament.
To her, they need to be organically, not conventionally, beautiful, to exist in
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conscious foundational relationship to all other pieces. Nor can she herself
exist in Rome as an ornament, using the exotic fragmentariness as mere
background to her foreground. However, neither her inability to read a
foreign city, whose past and present are an enigma to her, nor her inability to
“see” the world at home is a rejection of ‘worldly’ knowledge. Her
confusion is more innocent than that would be, for rejection implies some
awareness. Dorothea does not see what does not make sense to her, what her
moral sense cannot decode; her vision of the world, under the pressure of all
that fragmentation “mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing
forgetfulness and degradation,” leads her not to clear sight, not to blindness,
but to “a disease of the retina.” “Good” readers have a “defense” against
such feeling and thus such confusion.
Dorothea lacks confidence in her ability to understand the moral
foundations which would make all of Rome spiritually understandable, a
much more important kind of “knowledge” to her than that marked by her
more simple ignorance of the city’s symbols and stories. At home, she has
had it impressed upon her by the world that political economy is that kind of
knowledge, and she does not reject it, quite—that is part of her innocence—
she merely believes that she does not understand it, that she does not possess
that secret knowledge that would explain how political economy as practiced
by the world is a morally good thing. In Rome, she does not even have the
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Catholic equivalent of political economy to hang her hopes and her confusion
upon. The diseased retina of Rome is too much of a challenge for her meager
knowledge and her shakily founded principles. But if we look back to her
reading of Mr Casaubon, we can compare that expectation to her “reading” of
a smaller but similarly fragmentary text:
She filled up all blanks with unmanifested perfections, interpreting
him as she interpreted the works of Providence, and accounting for
seeming discords by her own deafness to the higher harmonies. And
there are many blanks left in the weeks of courtship, which a loving
faith fills with happy assurance. (75)
We can see here how she retains her innocence from the “worldly” reading
that is pushing up against her own: rather than switching to a coherent but
spiritually abhorrent interpretation, and in doing so acquiescing to its
assumptions and its moral logic, she credits her own deficiencies as a reader
with causing the blur before her. Instead of being totally divorced from the
world, then, Dorothea displays a naive faith in it:
. . . but it was not entirely out of devotion to her future husband that
she wished to know Latin and Greek. Those provinces of masculine
knowledge seemed to her 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: how could she be
confident that one-roomed cottages were not for the glory of God,
when men who knew the classics appeared to conciliate indifference
to the cottages with zeal for the glory? Perhaps even Hebrew might
be necessary—at least the alphabet and a few roots—in order to arrive
at the core of things, and judge soundly on the social duties of the
Christian. (64)
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She still believes that in some way the “worldly” world, or at least the best
parts of it, and her own reading of the world can be reconciled. As Ruskin
does, in assuming some original and thus moral meaning, she assumes some
organically coherent world that would be readable, perhaps, if she only knew
its original language—this is the world that would be “real” to her.
Dorothea’s search for knowledge is part of a quest to improve her
vision, her understanding of that organic world. Dorothea is aware of her
difficulties reading the world, and that recognition of her incapacity is what
drives her marital plot. Dorothea is looking for knowledge, knowledge which
will explain the moral inconsistencies of the world that she sees (arguably the
‘real’ world), and knowledge that will give a firmer and more coherent
foundation for the principles by which she wishes to live, according to which
she wishes to interact with the world. This is what she thinks she finds in
Casaubon: “Here was something beyond the shallows of ladies’-school
literature: here was a living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile complete
knowledge with devoted piety; here was a modem Augustine who united the
glories of doctor and saint” (25). Unlike Ruskin’s girl readers Dorothea does
not blindly accept moral authority on trust. She wants to “reconcile”
knowledge and piety: the understanding of the world and her faith in herself
and the good she can do in it. She is not happy to exist merely as mechanical
or dumb instrument of sympathy in someone else’s hands, but would like to
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operate from a more organic intention: “I cannot imagine myself living
without some opinions, but I should wish to have good reasons for them, and
a wise man could help me to see which opinions had the best foundation, and
would help me to live according to them” (40-41).
The knowledge Dorothea’s seeks is presented as a metaphor of the
place in which she would live. It is made obvious that Dorothea is an oddity,
that no one she knows at the beginning of the novel is in sympathy with her
aims or desires. Other characters see this as a problem of vision as much as
she does. Celia thinks
Dodo would perhaps not make a husband happy who had not her way
of looking at things; and stifled in the depths of her heart was the
feeling that her sister was too religious for family comfort. Notions
and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or
sitting down, or even eating. (21)
Mrs. Cadwallader is less kind when she consoles Sir James on his failed
courtship: “Come, come, cheer up! you are well rid of Miss Brooke, a girl
who would have been requiring you to see the stars by daylight” (59). But
Dorothea’s is not simply a selfish demand that someone see things her way.
Mrs. Cadwallader’s description is not ‘realistic,’ but is perhaps as close as her
language can come to explaining Dorothea’s difference. Dorothea wishes to
live in a world that is intelligible to her, but she also wishes to share that
world with someone. We see a hint of this is in her comment to Casaubon:
“You must often be weary with the pursuit of subjects in your own track. I
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shall gain enough if you will take me with you there” (50). She wants to go
“there,” a place where everything makes sense. She constructs even
relationship as a place: “Poor Dorothea before her marriage had never found
much room in other minds for what she cared most to say; and she had not, as
we know, enjoyed her husband’s superior instruction so much as she had
expected... ” (361).
Dorothea’s visionary place is a world where defenses are not
needed—a world where even Rome would make sense. Eventually, in the
relationship with Will, who is not likely to be anyone’s candidate for most
solidly worldly person, the world she desires to live in, “visionary” in almost
anyone else’s view, is represented in the most “realistic” terms. In the midst
of the misery that is her marriage to Casaubon:
She longed for work which would be directly beneficent like the
sunshine and the rain, and now it appeared that she was to live more
and more in a virtual tomb, where there was the apparatus of a ghastly
labour producing what would never see the light. To-day she had
stood in the door of the tomb and seen Will Ladislaw receding into
the distant world of warm activity and fellowship—turning his face
towards her as he went. (475)
Although we might read “the distant world of activity and fellowship” that
Will is “receding into” as the actual world of Middlemarch, I would associate
it with the world of “directly beneficent” work that is “like the sunshine and
the rain.” Surely “warmth” and “fellowship” are more fitting to the world of
her longings than they are to the Middlemarch we are introduced to in the
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novel. This vision is one that is more real than the “virtual tomb” that her
daily life has become, and more realistic than the dreams of her “wandering”
in Casaubon’s mind. This “visionary future” is one where Dorothea interacts
with the world, where she will “work” and have a direct effect on those
around her, as integral to the flow of events as the sunshine and the rain: a
world, perhaps, not so different from the one of the novel’s famous
conclusion, where “the effect of her being was incalculably diffusive” (838)
Knowledge as Feeling: Reading the Relationship Between Self and
World
Such a reading of Dorothea’s vision and desire is a complication of
Ruskin’s Queenly ideal, a rejection of his limited reading of female feeling as
knowledge, his limited aesthetic of vision for women. Ruskin’s is an intense
yet absolute model: for women, feeling is the only knowledge they need to
fulfill their moral role in the world. This is an extreme attempt to restrict the
“real” to individual, and some would say idiosyncratic, sense. In the 1871
Preface, he advises girls to think of themselves as instruments:
Write down, then, frankly, what you are, or, at least, what you think
yourself,. . . that you may determine to the best of your intelligence
what you are good for and can be made into. You will find that the
mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other
people, will, in the quickest and delicatest of ways, improve yourself.
Thus, from the beginning, consider all your accomplishments as
means of assistance to others... .Get your voice disciplined and clear,
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and think only of accuracy; never of effect or expression; if you have
any soul worth expressing, it will show itself in your singing; but
most likely there are very few feelings in you, at present, needing any
particular expression; and the one thing you have to do is to make a
clear-voiced little instrument of yourself, which other people can
entirely depend upon for the note wanted. (18: 38-39)
Although he begins with the command for the girl to look inward, to write
down “what you are, or at least, what you think yourself,” that focus almost
immediately extends beyond the self: the girl is to “determine .. . what you
are good for and can be made into.” The girl is to judge herself based not
upon measuring her inner self according to some standard, but instead upon
an assessment of her usefulness in the world. And this value is one
predicated upon her action and her existence in the world: resolving “not to
be useless” along with the desire “to help other people” is the best way to
“improve yourself.” The girl cannot measure her own worth unless she sees
herself as acting in and affected by the world around her. She should not
remain isolated in the garden that her parents provide for her, but aim to
make all England that place of peace, the future promised by Ruskin’s
Queen.
But the girl of Ruskin’s Preface is not yet a Queen, and so should be
aware of her limitations, knowing how to read herself, to read her feeling as
her knowledge, as Dorothea will wish to do. The girl should not aim for the
status of a heroine concerned with “effect or expression” on the world’s
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stage, for “most likely there are very few feelings in you . . . needing any
particular expression.” She must keep a particular interpretation of herself
and her abilities in mind: not only are her “accomplishments” to be read as
“means of assistance to others,” but her entire self is to be a tool, “a clear
voiced little instrument. . . which other people can entirely depend upon for
the note wanted.” The girl is an instrument which exists within the flow of
events, within historical time with other people’s needs, expectations, and
judgments. As the wind plays upon an Aeolian harp, so the events and
people the girl encounters “play” upon her. There is no musician but history,
or God. Woman is a conduit both of God’s moral judgment, through her
emotional reaction to the world, and of his mercy, in her practical attempts to
be of “help.” She, as an instrument, is a “medium” for sympathy and
instruction. As merely an instrument, she should not seek to “express” her
soul: “it will show itself’ in her singing.
Equally important to the girl is how not to read herself. She must
learn to see the world properly, to respond to it “helpfully,” and in doing so to
“fit” into the flow of events in her particular part of the world, and in doing
so to leave the larger world be. Feeling, especially moral feeling, equals
knowledge, but only of a very limited kind, which is just the restriction that
Dorothea resents. Ruskin’s young girl should focus on “accuracy” and on the
giving of “the note wanted” rather than try to cause any particular “effect” or
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“express” any particular thing because doing the latter would be an attempt to
control the flow of events rather than assist them. She is not supposed to be
writing the world (directing it through her own narratives or actions) but
reading and responding to it. As she reads it, reads it as it is, not as she
would wish it to be according to some fantasy narrative of her own creation,
then she can see how to best fit in, and assist in its becoming what it should
be. The world is not a setting with a cast of characters for the girl to
deploy—a canvas for the expression of her own will (or soul). The world is
to be read, instead, as containing moral relationships that she will participate
in. Her job is to play her part, the part already determined for her.
Limiting knowledge to feeling in this way leaves Dorothea uncertain.
She wishes to understand the world, not just work in it blindly—she wants a
broader aesthetic vision than Ruskin offers to women. For one who is so
Queen-like, however, Dorothea goes to an extreme in expressing her desire
for intellectual knowledge:
She was humiliated to find herself a mere victim of feeling, as if she
could know nothing except through that medium: all her strength was
scattered in fits of agitation, of struggle, of despondency, and then
again in visions of more complete renunciation, transforming all hard
conditions into duty. Poor Dorothea! she was certainly
troublesome—to herself chiefly. (198)
The narrator mocks her, here, but that mockery seems especially unkind
when Dorothea is struggling to escape a very feminine mode of being. This
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almost masculine desire for knowledge is also a factor in her reading of the
world. The Girl responds to the world minutely, to the immediate scene and
her internal promptings. The Queen, I gather, translates this experience to a
wider field of experience and gives verbal as well as “sympathetic” help in
the world (her reading remains the same). Both Girl and Queen will, in a
sense, ignore the larger narrative of history or experience, especially that
reading of it that would be most authoritative (God’s), in order to concentrate
on keeping their part of it flowing smoothly. Dorothea wishes to know the
larger narrative, or at least the logic of it—its aim and its purpose. This is a
different relationship to the “flow” of events than the Girl experiences—a
more conscious and perhaps more controlling one, risking comparison to the
likes of Rosamond:
She only felt that there was something irrevocably amiss and lost in
her lot, and her thoughts about the future were the more readily
shapen into resolve. Ardent souls, ready to construct their coming
lives, are apt to commit themselves to the fulfillment of their own
visions. (548)
Such an ability is dangerous and can be turned to selfish as well as helpful
purposes. But Eliot seems to be suggesting, as even Ruskin’s Queen hints,
that this ability to “fulfill their own visions” is exactly the power that woman,
or any “ardent soul” bent on bettering the world, needs.
But Knowledge cannot replace feeling: it alone cannot be her goal, for
such knowledge is incomplete, lacking the moral connection to the world that
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feeling provides. This other extreme is just as abhorrent to her and is key to
her dislike of objective reading, which she articulates as a painful distance.
Her struggle to read the world is painful because it forces her to experience
that distance. Even once she begins to learn to read the odd pictures in Rome
- “Some things which had seemed monstrous to her were gathering
intelligibility and even a natural meaning”—she tells Will, ‘“I think I would
rather feel that the painting is beautiful than have to read it as an enigma”
(214). Although she does not wish to be a creature of feeling only, to be one
who only reads is horrific. Dorothea from the first finds the fragmentary and
incoherent texts that the world presents her to be fatiguing. Thus we see her
escaping from the “stupendous fragmentariness” of her bridal life:
She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to the
chief points of view, had been shown the greatest ruins and the most
glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive
out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and
sky, away from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own
life too seemed to be a masque with enigmatical costumes.
She chooses the openness of the Campagna, where she is not faced with
forms demanding to be read. The Campagna, that place “where she could
feel alone with the earth and the sky,” functions like the view out her
window, a view that seems to exists not to be read, but to reflect in some way
her mood or the inner visions that she is preoccupied with, or at the very
least, to provide her the room for visions of her own. And these visions are
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ones of openness: “How was it that in the weeks since her marriage,
Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a trifling depression, that
the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her
husband’s mind were replaced by the ante-rooms and winding passages
which seemed to lead no wither?” (195). Dorothea wants space not distance:
space to project herself into, space that allows for “directly beneficent”
action, not distance to mark her separateness, an arid isolation. The
painfulness of objective reading is most tragic when she must stand apart
from her husband:
She began to hear herself, and was checked into stillness. Like one
who has lost his way and is weary she sat and saw as in one glance all
the paths of her young hope which she would never find again. And
just as clearly in the miserable light she saw her own and her
husband’s solitude—how they walked apart so that she was obliged to
survey him. If he had drawn her towards him, she would never have
surveyed him, she would have felt him simply a part of her own life.
Now she said bitterly, ‘It is his fault, not mine.’ In the jar of her
whole being, Pity was overthrown. Was it her fault that she had
believed in him—had believed in his worthiness?—And what,
exactly, was he?— She was able enough to estimate him—she who
waited on his glances with trembling, and shut her best soul in prison,
paying it only hidden visits, that she might be petty enough to please
him. In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate. (426)
She is forced to “survey” Mr Casaubon, which requires that she acknowledge
the distance between herself and her husband, her text. She is now in a
position to look at both him and herself, to “see” their paths and their
relationship to each other. Dorothea would rather “believe,” which allows
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her to feel, than read in such a way. The quality of feeling for her husband
has changed as she has lost her “knowledge” of him, mistaken as it was.
Dorothea can only “feel” in lieu of this distanced reading if the world she is
looking at has already in some way been read, been incorporated into her
idiosyncratic vision. Dorothea would most likely not enjoy reading
Middlemarch.
Dorothea is not willing to be guided simply by the mysterious
promptings of her feelings, but wants to found her actions in knowledge and
feeling combined, not a “worldly” knowledge but that better understanding of
how her world works. In this way, Eliot addresses what Ruskin elides, the
problematic authority of judgment. As Ruskin bases the authority of
feminine judgment on the Queen’s feeling, on the prompting of her bodily
moral sense, such a sense must be healthy and must be accompanied by a
trained and selfless eye which can discern the scene it will then automatically
judge. In some ways, Eliot’s depiction of Dorothea is not too distant from
this:
All her eagerness for acquirement lay within that full current of
sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were habitually
swept along. 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 constrained her conscience. But
something she yearned for by which her life might be filled with
action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for
guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened
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yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but knowledge?
Surely learned men kept the only oil; and who more learned than Mr
Casaubon? (86-7)
She wants to wear her knowledge tight to “the nerves and blood which fed
her action.” She wants knowledge and the emotion which drives her actions
to be intertwined. But she also wants that action to be “at once rational and
ardent.” An outsider, a Ruskin, may see and claim female moral action to be
“rational,” but it is not a claim that the woman herself would be likely to
make, not because of the distance she would need to find in order to view and
judge her own action (even girls are told to practice this), but from the
temptations to complacency and even to worldliness that her judgment of
herself as “rational” would denote. The Queen is to “feel” that she is doing
right, and to “know” it based upon her moral response to her activity. She is
to know through her body, not through her intellect. But Eliot is a scientific
historian rather than one with a taste for the transcendent like Ruskin.
Dorothea’s desire for knowledge is one way in which she is one with her
times. But she differs from most of her fellows in not relying solely on
knowledge— she wishes it to flow with her blood and her nerves.
Reading Dorothea
As interesting and as important the way that such a woman reads is to
the world, is the way she is read by others; for how she is read is key to
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whether or to what extent the world will be ready to share her vision. One of
the goals of Eliot’s novel is to teach its readers sympathy—both the ability to
read the stories or situations of others and to respond to them emotionally—a
physiological response as well an intellectual one. The complexities of
Dorothea’s representation, however, based in the novel’s demand for
“realistic” depiction and Eliot’s desire herself to be objective, trouble that
teaching. According to Eliot, “My artistic bent is directed . . . to the
presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant
judgment, pity, and sympathy” (Letters 2: 299). Though many focus on the
emotional aspects of her artistic direction—the tolerance, the pity, the
sympathy—equally important to her works is judgment. Judgment, no matter
how tolerant, reprises just that distance which Dorothea herself fights against.
While the narration as a whole, or in isolated moments does call forth that
pity and sympathy, it just as frequently calls us to judgment. Eliot is not
Dorothea and she cannot be if she is to write a Realist novel. The narration
controls our response to Dorothea, or at best, it makes us sensitive to that
response. The conventions of realism as a whole are made for “good
readers”—the pragmatic, the middling, all claim the authority of
“objectivity.” Even when Eliot explicitly resists such an ethos, her very
carefulness in delineating the limitations of every perspective leaves us wary.
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We wish to protect ourselves from reading badly, even if, or especially if, we
are not certain what that “badly” might entail.
Like Felix Holt, Dorothea is in search of a good, strong, vision.
However, she wishes that sight to be more than momentary, to continue as
her everyday vision. She would like her sight to complement her work as she
would like her knowledge to be as close as feeling. The realist narrative of
her novel, however, is better at representing an aesthetic of labor—is
convincing in showing her at work, making mistakes, attempting to help,
succeeding and failing in those attempts. This narrative of work, while it
involves her aesthetic vision, is more proper to the novel than the specific
details of that vision itself. For Middlemarch that representation is successful
only in so far as that vision is incomplete: fitting the novel’s aesthetic of
labor, she does not quite “see” the world she would like to live in. So Eliot
can for the most part limit herself to representing Dorothea’s approach to
such vision, avoiding a description of what the vision itself would look like
and along with it the accompanying problems of novelistic and pragmatic
evaluation. The most powerful support for Dorothea’s aesthetic of vision in
the novel, thus, is not direct—those moments when Eliot “objectively”
questions all other visions that are quick to doubt it.
The narrator makes it clear that Dorothea is not a creature who really
fits the realist novel. The representation of Dorothea is very much positioned
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as in battle with “good” or worldly readings of women and of the world. For
the most part the narrator mocks any “common sense” reading of her heroine.
We are introduced to her through a variety of worldly readers whose desires
are very different from hers. The main contrast in matters spiritual is to Celia
who “mildly acquiesced in all her sister’s sentiments, only infusing them with
that common-sense which is able to accept momentous doctrines without any
eccentric agitation” (8). The tone here suggests that that “eccentric
agitation” might to less dull minds be religious feeling itself. By cutting that
emotion out, Celia reduces Dorothea’s sentiments to common sense, which
turns them into something entirely different. In contrast to this controlling,
compartmentalizing “common sense,” Dorothea desires a more Ruskinian
approach: “Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty
conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and
her own rule of conduct there.” Dorothea wishes to reconcile her own desires
and agitations, already marked as “eccentric,” with “the parish of Tipton” in
“some lofty conception of the world.” But such a desire is marked as
dangerous by the narrator:
she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing
whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek
martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all
in a quarter where she had not sought it. (8)
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Dorothea, we are warned, will make mistakes, and the mistakes will be
surprising not only to the world which is a stranger to her, but also surprising
to herself.
The difficulty that Middlemarch has in reading Dorothea affects the
presentation of her marriage plot. Dorothea’s eccentricities make her unfit
for the Middlemarch marriage mart: “Certainly such elements in the character
of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from
being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine
affection” (8). With Dorothea, there is the potential that no one would “own”
her beauty and thus her influence:
And how should Dorothea not marry?—a girl so handsome and with
such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and
her insistence on regulating her life according to notions which might
cause a wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer, or even
might lead her at last to refuse all offers. (9)
The passage is difficult, for we find here a mixture of objective-sounding
description, like “her love of extremes,” which we already know will lead to
difficulty, but we also have to suspect that “wary man” who, it turns out, is
afraid that “such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with a new
scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with political
economy and the keeping of saddle-horses” (9). This man would not
recognize the advice of Ruskin’s Queen in a Dorothea:
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Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safe
guard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not
acted on. Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any
lunatics were at large, one might now and avoid them.
All Dorothea’s puritan energy, ideals, plans, and spirit are reduced here to
“opinions,” and “weak” ones at that, which of course can be regulated by the
neighbors. The ambiguity of tone reflects the difficulty in representing in a
realist frame a “theoretic” soul, one that sees the emotional and the moral life
as the same, from within the context of a community resistant to change. A
Queen will find it very difficult to do her work in such a place.
Because it is clear that she is not quite a “realist” text in the way that
her neighbors are, the question of how we are to read such a non-realistic
figure lingers. Our first introduction to Dorothea is a discussion of her
beauty, which is “of a kind which seems to be thrown into relief by poor
dress.” These first lines which present her beauty in the context of her dress,
read her in terms of contrast. Dorothea stands out in this world with her
“finely formed” wrists, and “her profile as well as her stature and bearing”
which “seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments.” The
contrast between her physical self and her garments are then contrasted to the
clothing of other women: “by the side of provincial fashion” her own “gave
her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,— or from one of our
elder poets,— in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper.” Dorothea is text, and
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therefore readable, but that legibility is challenging. As a “fine quotation
from the Bible,— or from one of our elder poets,” she is not the text of
“today,” especially of “to-day’s newspapers.” Such a description mocks
these Middlemarchers, but in showing how they categorize and thus
marginalize her, we are allowed to participate in that conceptualization. In
contrast to her sister, Celia, Dorothea’s beauty is perceived as “strange” to a
world that would emphasize “today”:
The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the
cottagers, was generally in favour of Celia, as being so amiable and
innocent-looking, while Miss Brooke’s large eyes seemed, like her
religion, too unusual and striking. Poor Dorothea! compared with her,
the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so much
subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of
blazonry or clock-face of it. (9)
This description emphasizes the parochial nature of taste. Middlemarch is
about this community in particular -they only appreciate a commonplace
type of beauty, a loveliness closely associated with the amiableness of Celia’s
pragmatism. Celia is a beauty in the world of the newspaper (which carries
useful information about the world as well as advertising to increase the
circulation of such useful things) and canine affection (for procreation and
complacent living). Dorothea is poetry to Celia’s prose, passion to her
affection, spirit to her form. Her innocence is a more “true” innocence—that
of Italian madonnas, not of country freshness—an innocence of spirit rather
than of flesh. “To-day”, Middlemarch can no longer read or appreciate such
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spiritual fineness, spiritual beauty, perhaps not even spiritual content.
Dorothea’s beauty is so striking because of its setting, which is both her dress
and her community. The one is plain; the second is pedestrian.
Middlemarchers are interested in the status quo (today’s problems,
yesterday’s solutions), the mundane, the countable, the palatable. They
desire ease in both understanding and living, leaving them complacent and
suspicious. These people who make up her larger “setting” cannot see the
beauty that they throw into relief. But there is also a suggestion here that
some of that spiritual beauty may be easily overestimated. The shabbiness of
her setting may make her stand out more than she might in some other
“mixture.” Her very difference throws any judgment of her into doubt.
The novel continues to describe her using words which are vulnerable
to the Middlemarch perspective. A frequent descriptive of any moment
related to Dorothea’s aesthetic vision is “childish.” The narrator relates her
early interaction with Casaubon, for example:
He was being unconsciously wrought upon by the charms of a nature
which was entirely without hidden calculations either for immediate
effects or for remoter ends. It was this which made Dorothea so
childlike, and according to some judges, so stupid, with all her
reputed cleverness. (51)
On the one hand, “childlike” carries some Wordsworthian power: a more
active spiritual perception. The power of Dorothea’s “charm” here lies in the
absence of “hidden calculations either for immediate effects or for remoter
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ends.” Dorothea here is most like the Girl as Ruskin describes her, reacting
only to the moment and with affection. But “some judges” call this “stupid,”
as if intelligence were related to calculation, as if an almost mathematical
manipulation of the world, even if only to protect the self, were the sign of
maturity. This is definitely a voice of middle-class prudence and industry.
Even if we choose not to identify with that voice, the negative connotations
of “childlike” haunt other moments. It is perhaps not surprising that the
power of her influence is also associated with child-like quality. During one
meeting, Will is “mysteriously forced to be just as simple as she was” (362).
And later in the same scene they are described as looking “at the other as if
they had been two flowers which had opened then and there” (362-3). Such a
description is, of course, disturbing in the sense that its language seems to
leave no room for any mature sexual feeling between the two. But I think the
use of such words and phrases as “simple” and “two flowers,” is inherently
ambiguous. Like her desire to live in a world of sun and rain, our judgment
of it depends upon how we understand the world. How we read such
descriptions, such desires depends entirely on how we value the directness
and openness they imply. To most modem readers, who must qualify as the
“worldly” sort, openness and simplicity imply emptiness, the lack of any
“hidden” meanings the sign that there is nothing of interest there to hide. But
such an interpretation is a biased one, one that has already closed itself off
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from the influence of another way of seeing: Dorothea’s way, Ruskin’s way,
Wordsworth’s way, and perhaps, in certain moods, Eliot’s way. The work of
responding to the world so “simply” and “openly” is actually a complex and
demanding one in its very attention to minute detail and its exposure of the
self s body to the pains of others.
Eliot clearly links childishness to that potential to hear the “roar
which lies on the other side of silence.” She probes our response to
Dorothea’s desire for knowledge:
And she had not reached that point of renunciation at which she
would have been satisfied with having a wise husband; she wished,
poor child, to be wise herself. Miss Brooke was certainly very naive
with all her alleged cleverness. Celia, whose mind had never been
thought too powerful, saw the emptiness of other people’s pretensions
much more readily. To have in general but little feeling, seems to be
the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.
(64)
This use of “child” is definitely one that is more sympathetic to Dorothea.
The literal words mock her desire to “be wise herself,” but the tone of the
words mock anyone who would speak them. In this instance “that point of
renunciation,” is not one that Dorothea, for all her liking of “giving things
up” is likely to foresee. Instead, it is a stage more apt to be pressed upon her
by those of a more worldly bent. Her naivete is once again a sign of her
being out of step, but here her difference is in relation to a familiarly
contained femininity. This voice skewers those who deem “feeling too much
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on any particular occasion” something from which to be “secured.” It is an
empty security indeed that is founded on “but little feeling” in general.
Perhaps readers who mock Dorothea and Will staring at each other like “two
flowers” do so out of fear of such “excess.”
Dorothea and Will pursue the question of what the appropriate
amount of feeling might be, of where between the “roar” and “stupidity” we
might fall. Dorothea claims,
I should like to make life beautiful—I mean everybody’s life. And
then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie
outside life and to 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.
Dorothea’s feelings seem rather far from that “coarse emotion” that can’t
bear to sense the pain of others. And in this example, it is the pain of
“everybody.” Will calls this “the fanaticism of sympathy”:
You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If
you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness,
and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best
piety is to enjoy—when you can. You are doing the most then to save
the earth’s character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates.
It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken
care of when you feel delight—in art or in anything else. Would you
turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, waiting and
moralizing over misery? I suspect that you have some false belief in
the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom. (219-
220)
Will exaggerates Dorothea’s claim to feeling, reading it as an inability to
endure the contrast between self and other, so much so that to see the self as
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at an “advantage” would turn all “goodness” to misery. But Dorothea does
not claim pain so completely. She feels a pleasure which then is “spoiled”
when she is “made to think that most people are shut out from it.”
Dorothea’s argument echoes Ruskin’s parable of the two sisters. The
pleasure itself is not an evil; the fact that not everyone can feel it is. But that
is not to make a “false belief in the virtues of misery.” Will’s claim that “It is
no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when
you feel delight—in art or in anything else” is equally as extreme, and
perhaps even more naive. Will shows here that he doesn’t quite share
Dorothea’s vision of a world of beneficent sun and rain. Will sets up two
extremes: one, which he attributes to Dorothea, wants to see the world as “a
tragic chorus, waiting and moralizing over misery”; the other wants to make
the world a place of pleasure, a feeling that will spread because “enjoyment
radiates.” Dorothea’s in contrast is no binary understanding of pleasure and
pain: both sun (enjoyment) and rain (renunciation) are a good in her
philosophy.
As the novel progresses, the narrator gives more signs of approving
Dorothea, even as she holds to the seeming foolishness of her convictions.
The narrator even describes her visionary world as a successful one for her.
The conflict between her world and the “worldly” or more “accurate” one
mysteriously seems to not be harmful to her, though it should be:
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There was a peculiar fascination for Dorothea in this division of
property intended for herself, and always regarded by her as
excessive. She was blind, you see, to many things obvious to
others—likely to tread in the wrong places, as Celia had warned her;
yet her blindness to whatever did not lie in her own pure purpose
carried her safely by the side of precipices where vision would have
been perilous with fear. (372)
Celia’s metaphor of “treading in the wrong places” returns, now indicating,
not blindness, but an ability to see a different world, one that overlaps this
one rather precariously. More radical, however, is Dorothea’s growing
ability to withstand objective vision:
When Dorothea was out on the gravel walks, she lingered among the
nearer clumps of trees, hesitating, as she had done once before,
though from a different cause. Then she had feared lest her effort at
fellowship should be unwelcome; now she dreaded going to the spot
where she foresaw that she must bind herself to a fellowship from
which she shrank. Neither law nor the world’s opinion compelled her
to this—only her husband’s nature and her own compassion, only the
ideal and not the real yoke of marriage. She saw clearly enough the
whole situation, yet she was fettered: she could not smite the stricken
soul that entreated hers. If that were weakness, Dorothea was weak.
(481)
As before her marriage, she does not listen to “the world’s opinion,” but acts
only out of “her own compassion,” and her adherence to “the ideal and not
the real yoke of marriage.” For once, Dorothea is reading her bit of the world
in a way that we might call “correct”: “she saw clearly enough the whole
situation,” her husband’s lack of trust and belief in her. She sees “clearly
enough,” but that sight does not cancel out that “ideal yoke” and so she is
“fettered.” She is capable of objective and visionary sight simultaneously,
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and of holding to the one in the face of the “fact” of the other. The narrator,
for once, whole-heartedly approves: “If that were weakness, Dorothea was
weak.” The claim of weakness is in defiance of those who would use the
word disparagingly in such a case. Echoing that choice of the ideal in face of
the actual, Dorothea is eventually shown to be able to both understand the
world’s perspective, but also to challenge it:
‘I never called anything by the same name that all the people about
me did,’ said Dorothea, stoutly.
‘But I suppose you have found out your mistake, my dear,’ said Mrs
Cadwallader, ‘and that is a proof of sanity.’
Dorothea was aware of the sting, but it did not hurt her. ‘No,’ she
said, ‘I still think that the greater part of the world is mistaken about
many things. Surely one may be sane and yet think so, since the
greater part of the world has often had to come round from its
opinion.’ (537)
As was not the case during her time in Rome, Dorothea now has knowledge.
She feels the “sting” of Mrs Cadwallader’s opinion, but it does not “hurt
her”—she perceives it but does not let it cause her to doubt her own
perceptions. She even takes Mrs Cadwallader’s pointed word, “sanity,” and
turns it around in support of her own perspective. The one uses “sane” as a
word of containment. The neighbor who “has found out” his mistake, is a
sheep ready to return to the fold of the community’s opinion. Dorothea,
though, as ever breaks from community, going so far as to claim that “the
greater part of the world is mistaken about many things.” But her support
comes not from some ideal world of her own, but from a world of intellectual
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history: “Surely one may be sane and yet think so, since the greater part of
the world has often had to come round from its opinion.” She has, at least
momentarily, linked the ideal and the real, a scene of clear triumph.
Another way to judge Dorothea would be to look at her effect on the
world. According to the representation of her intentions and her
understanding, she appears naive. However, as we see in her championing of
Lydgate and in her sympathy with Rosamond, though she does not always
have the effect she wishes for, or perhaps even thinks she has achieved
(Rosamond is not long changed by their encounter), she does have a positive
influence, even if that influence is a minor one. But this “judging” is the
wrong kind of activity. Like the cynics who advise against giving a beggar
fresh clothing, the focus of such an evaluation is on “effect.” Such a moral
superiority is part of the “wadding” against the roar that prevents true moral
feeling. We can see such a distinction in perhaps the most often derided
example of the foolishness of Dorothea’s vision, her plan for the
little colony, where everybody should work, and all the work should
be done well. I should know every one of the people and be their
friend. I am going to have great consultations with Mr Garth: he can
tell me almost everything I want to know. (530)
Her voice here seems especially childish, with her desire to “know” everyone
and to “be their friend,” and her plans “to have great consultations with Mr
Garth.” But, underlying the “simplicity” of her utterance, is a Ruskinian or
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Carlylean ethic of work: “all the work should be done well.” In addition, Mr.
Garth gives the plan and Dorothea herself his approval. As he tells his wife,
“she sees into things in that way.” If Dorothea is naive in the same “way”
that such a soul of the earth character is, then perhaps she is not such a
useless angel after all.
Eliot knows that she can only champion Dorothea’s visionary
approach indirectly through between the lines of realism’s conventions and
language. The conclusion of the novel leaves us with a recapitulation of her
various methods. We learn first that her search for knowledge has never been
satisfactorily concluded: “Dorothea herself had no dreams of being praised
above other women, feeling that there was always something better which
she might have done, if she had only been better and known better.” As
many critics have pointed out, this inability to identify a “better” is a problem
for the novel as well as for Dorothea herself. We see the limits of what she
does find:
No life would have been possible to Dorothea which was not filled
with emotion, and she had now a life filled also with a beneficent
activity which she had not the doubtful pains of discovering and
marking out for herself.
Dorothea’s life is one of activity; based upon an aesthetic reading of the
world, she is empowered by a somewhat larger understanding than Ruskin’s
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girls, for she has at the very least earned the confidence that her activity fits a
larger vision, one she found “for herself.”
She is not alone in her confusion about what she could have done or
been differently. In the summary of various readings of Dorothea’s life, we
find the same variety of opinions that we’ve met along the way:
Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a
creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be
only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother. But no one
stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have
done—not even Sir James Chettam, who went no further than the
negative prescription that she ought not to have married Will
Ladislaw. (836)
Even those others who feel she was made for “better” can only express their
“pity” or disapproval. Like Eliot trying to represent responses to her heroine,
they too can only identify that to which they are not willing to accede. As
there is no realistic language to describe her potential, so there is no path for
her to take in the world as it is. Such worldly readings culminate in
Middlemarch’s opinion:
Sir James never ceased to regard Dorothea’s second marriage as a
mistake; and indeed this remained the tradition concerning it in
Middlemarch, where she was spoken of to a younger generation as a
fine girl who had married a sickly clergyman, old enough to be her
father, and in little more than a year after his death gave up her estate
to marry his cousin—young enough to have been his son, with no
property, and not well-born. Those who had not seen anything of
Dorothea usually observed that she could not have been ‘a nice
woman,’ else she would not have married either the one or the other.
This is the epitome of reading “well” that Eliot has fought so hard against.
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Eliot lays the blame for that reading on readers like us:
Certainly, those determining acts of her life where not ideally
beautiful. They were the mixed result of a young and noble impulse
struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which
great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the
aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so
strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new
Theresa will 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 a 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.
The “conditions of an imperfect social state” are the matter of this realist
novel. That matter gives Dorothea’s “great feelings” and “great faith” the
“aspects of error “ and “illusion.” They not only confuse Dorothea’s vision,
but also ours. This is a description, again, of the novel’s difficulty as well as
of the characters’ inhabiting it. The narrator turns to the pronoun “we” in her
ultimate condemnation. Just as “our frames could hardly bear much” (194)
of the everyday pain of the world, so too do we “insignificant people with our
daily words and acts . . . prepare the lives of many Dorotheas.” We are the
“medium” that shapes the deeds of the ardent. We are the problem; we are
the real that the visionaries must battle.
If that responsibility lies with us, we might ask whether the novel has
worked to change us. The narrative itself creates such a propriety of
judgment that deadens feeling as it controls our response to Dorothea.
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Reading Middlemarch “well” makes us as defensive as the denizens of
Middlemarch. The novel’s preoccupation with delineating various levels of
feeling for each moment of moral action implies the existence of an
“appropriate” response to it as it undermines the one under examination. For
all her calls to sympathetic feeling, Eliot teaches us also the desire to be
“right”—to judge, not matter how tolerantly. The tension between the lesson
of sympathy and the lesson of judgment may very well be Eliot’s own
“wadding” against the roar.
How we read Dorothea, how we judge her “realism” as a character as
well as the “real” potential of her view of the world, how we assess her—all
these actions have already joined us in the struggle for healing the world’s
pains. Eliot tries to represent a character with “unrealistic” desires and
expectations within a realist narrative. Ruskin retools his vision of feminine
influence as a hectoring list of behaviors. Both are trying to communicate
their moral visions. Both are caught within the contradictions of their chosen
mode: Ruskin, when he leaves behind his inspiring, if unspecific, language
and Eliot in her adherence to the detailed examination of the human
experience according to the tradition she is writing within. What they both
are pointing to cannot be represented in the language most of the world uses.
Ruskin, in his lecture, can only do it because he understands words in his
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own idiosyncratic way. Eliot can only do it through metaphor and by the
implications of negative contrasts.
The final words of the novel stand in contrast to the ones with which I
began the chapter:
Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not
widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke
the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the
earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was
incalculably diffusive: for 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. (837-838)
Dorothea is living in a world of “directly beneficent” sun and rain, a world
that is not understood or reported by “historical” minds. Her effect on the
world is “incalculably diffusive” because her response to it is, and so is her
vision of it. The world as we know it needs the coarsely obvious, the
“historic” event, because “that element of tragedy which lies in the very fact
of its frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of
mankind.” The solution, at least in part, is Dorothea, with her “diffusive”
effect reaching out to that frequent suffering. But even she has a “frame”
that “could hardly bear much o f’ actually experiencing the suffering that a
“keen vision and feeling of all ordinary life” would bring. Like the rest of us,
Dorothea does not hear “that roar on the other side of silence.” Dorothea’s
difference, perhaps, is that she would like to do so, but she is limited, trying
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to create a remedy to all that unheard pain by imagining and so creating a
world where help is given and pain is responded to. Her focus is on the
solution, but she still has neither the apprehension nor the feeling of such
pain. Perhaps Dorothea is too real after all.
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Notes
1 See chapter two.
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Works Cited
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Ed. Rosemary Ashton. New York: Penguin,
1994.
Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin. Ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander
Wedderbum. 39vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
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Chapter Five
“The Whole Being Consents”: The Aesthetics of Moral Choice in Daniel
Deronda
In 1856 John Ruskin declared the darkness of modem society, a
terrible confusion morally and physically that demanded an equivalent form
of art. Not for this century the simple order of beauty he’d analyzed in detail
in the early volumes of Modem Painters. Instead, more grotesque forms of
art would pose the appropriate challenge to a corrupted age. The epitome of
such work would be Turner’s ominous dragon in Garden of the Hesnerides
and Ruskin’s own twisted English Madonna.
In Daniel Deronda (1876) George Eliot herself delivered a devastating
indictment of English culture through the detailed and compelling
representation of a tmly flawed heroine. However, Gwendolyn Harleth, to
the irritation, even indignation, of critics ever since, comes in second to
another kind of heroine in the novel’s matrimonial and aesthetic plotting—a
heroine who exhibits few of the markers of Realism.1 In this chapter I argue
that the narrative need for a Mirah Lapidoth, for a Mordecai, for Zionism, is
the result of a tension between Eliot’s sympathy with that “modernist” turn
and her continued commitment to the argument for the necessity of beauty.
The problem, though, is that the subtle representation of ideals which she
employs so starkly and skillfully in previous works is not so persuasive here,
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putting pressure on the idea of beauty as moral force by—according to many
critics—leaving us with an unsympathetic beauty, unsympathetic especially
to that more modem taste. We as readers are left to make and, hopefully
ponder, our own judgment, an aesthetic judgment of the novel itself.
The Beautiful vs. The Grotesque
Daniel Deronda’s, and arguably George Eliot’s, choice of Mirah
Lapidoth over Gwendolen Harleth is a choice of the beautiful over the
grotesque, a choice between two kinds of knowledge, two ideal hermeneutics.
I read Gwendolen as an example of Ruskin’s concept of the Noble Grotesque
as articulated in Modem Painters. Volume 5. Like Turner’s painting, Garden
of the Hesperides, the subject of Ruskin’s analysis, Gwendolen is a visual
object that disturbs the gaze as it attracts it, and in doing so represents an
alternate mode of knowledge, one that requires a hermeneutic involving more
effort and attention than a more “easily” interpreted embodiment of beauty.
Mirah represents the hermeneutic of the beautiful—reading the world as a
transparently moral thing in which the observer can “consent with his whole
being” to the object he observes—whether it be a woman, or the world itself
(the slippage between the two is common to Eliot as well as Ruskin). This
comparative analysis, however, is rather a forced one—neither Ruskin nor
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Eliot refers to women as grotesque, primarily due to their allegiance to the
idea of woman as the beautiful.
For Ruskin, “seeing” itself has become destabilized and contingent, a
state that has unexpected implications for the extent of women’s aesthetic
power. In Modem Painters IV, Ruskin educates the prospective painter and
spectator about the limits of vision:
We Never See Anything Clearly. . . everything we look at, be it large
or small, near or distant, has an equal quality of mystery in it;.. .there
is literally no point of clear sight, and there never can be. What we
call seeing a thing clearly, is only seeing enough of it to make out
what it is. (6: 75-76)
Especially for the “modem” painter, there is “No exception to this rale.
Excellence of the Highest Kind, Without Obscurity, Cannot Exist” (6: 81).
Such a mystification of knowledge limits the role of women both as
pursuers of it and as symbols of it. Ruskin describes the experience of this
more complex vision: “As soon as people try honestly to see all they can of
anything, they come to a point where a noble dimness begins. They see more
than others; but the consequence is they feel they cannot see at all” (6: 91).
This passage parallels up to a point Ruskin’s advice in “Of Queens’ Gardens”
that girls be allowed to
follow at least some one path of scientific attainment, as far as to the
threshold of that bitter Valley of Humiliation, into which only the
wisest and bravest of men can descend, owning themselves forever
children, gathering pebbles on a boundless shore. (18: 126)
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But it is at that “point,” the “point where noble dimness begins,” that the girl
must always pause and then retreat. In “Gardens” there are sound reasons for
this — all of which reinforce her role as the beautiful object. In addition to
learning a pleasing humility from her failure, she will also learn to avoid its
repetition in the future, which should guard her face from the strains that are
doubtless “indelibly written” on the faces of the great men who “must
struggle through intelligibility to obscurity.” She, without even being
allowed to try, must remain among the “second class” of whom Ruskin says,
“the best thing they can do, all their lives through, is to be intelligible” (6:
96). Woman’s intelligibility lies partly in her happy loveliness—her “vital
beauty.” Thus Ruskin advises that she, and those who guide her, should
never stop striving to make her beauty perfect, since “it cannot be too
powerful or shed its light too far.” In addition, such clarity allows her
perceiver to recognize her as sign, or type, of some virtue—he must of all
things be able “to make out what it is” -but perhaps, to “only” make out what
it is.2
As an alternative to the clarity (and by implication, the limitations) of
the beautiful, Ruskin offers the grotesque as a new aesthetic category. For
Ruskin, the noble kind of grotesque serves as a model of perception in a way
that the beautiful never does:
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A fine Grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of
symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths
which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way,
and of which the connection is left to the beholder to work out for
himself... .All noble grotesques are concentrations of this kind, and
the noblest convey truths which nothing else could convey; and not
only so, but convey them, in minor cases with a delightfulness,— in the
higher instances with an awfulness,— which no mere utterance of the
symbolized truth would have possessed, but which belongs to the
effort of the mind to unweave the riddle, or to the sense it has of there
being an infinite power and meaning in the thing seen, beyond all that
is apparent therein, giving the highest sublimity even to the most
trivial object so presented and so contemplated. (5: 132-3)
Thus, a grotesque work of art draws the beholder into participating in
Grotesque vision himself. And it is this experience of difficult, and often
failed, vision that is of importance, not the elusive “truths” that may be
missed.
One example of the grotesque that will have resonance for a reading
of Eliot’s heroine is Ruskin’s analysis in Modem Painters V (1860) of
Turner’s The Goddess of Discord choosing the apple of contention in the
Garden of the Hesperides. The Hesperides are the three daughters of
Hesperus who “[dwell] in this western garden, and [have] charge of the tree
of the golden apples, the gift of earth to Juno on her wedding day; the
Hesperides and the garden were protected by the dragon Ladon.” These are
the golden apples which will soon feature in the Judgment of Paris and the
start of the Trojan wars. The instigator of these troubles, The Goddess of
Discord, “is on the right in the act of receiving the golden apple (or orange)
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from one of the Hesperides. The dragon is seen lying along the summit of a
lofty rock, in the middle distance” (7: 391n2).
Ruskin reads both the dragon and the Hesperian nymphs in a
complicated allusory way, one that entangles messages about gender, wealth,
and destructive power. “The wealth of the earth”—the golden apples—“as
the source of household peace and plenty, is watched by the singing
nymphs—the Hesperides. But as the source of household sorrow and
desolation, it is watched by the Dragon” (7:396). The Dragon’s family
connections fit him for this duty. Noting that his sisters are the Gorgons in
one tradition, Ruskin reads his ancestors as symbolizing “the consuming
(poisonous and volcanic) passions—the ‘flame-backed dragon,’ uniting the
powers of poison, and instant destruction” (7: 397-8). In another tradition,
the dragon’s mother, Echidna,
joins the intense fatality of the lightning with perfect gentleness. In
form she is half-maiden, half-serpent; therefore she is the spirit of all
fatallest evil, veiled in gentleness: or, in one word, treachery;— having
dominion over many gentle things;— and chiefly over a kiss, given,
indeed, in another garden than that of the Hesperides, yet in relation
to the keeping of treasure also (7: 399)
—a reference to Judas’ kiss and the thirty pieces of silver. Ultimately, the
dragon, like his mother, embodies contradiction: “one of the essential
characteristics of the creature, as descended from Medusa, is its coldness and
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petrifying power; this, in the demon of covetousness, must exist to the
utmost; breathing fire, he is yet himself of ice” (7: 402).
Out of this complex of mythology and symbol, Ruskin constructs a
thesis which foreshadows Eliot’s vision of “modem” England:
Such then is our English painter’s first great religious picture; and
exponent of our English faith. A sad-coloured work . . . in a
sulphurous hue, as relating to a paradise of smoke. That power, it
appears, on the hill-top, is our British Madonna: whom, reverently,
the English devotional painter must paint, thus enthroned, with
nimbus about the gracious head. Our Madonna,— or our Jupiter on
Olympus,— or, perhaps, more accurately still, our unknown god, sea
born, with the cliffs, not of Cyrene, but of England, for his alter; and
no chance of any Mars’ Hill proclamation concerning him, “whom
therefore ye ignorantly worship.” (7: 407-8)
The British Madonna is an ambiguously-gendered dragon, crowned with a
“nimbus” of petrifying gorgon snakes , guarding a coveted but corrupting
wealth.
With this new way of seeing, one that he feels is so desperately
needed in the “paradise of smoke” that is England, Ruskin announces “the
dawn of a new era of art, in a true unison of the grotesque with the realistic
power” (5: 137). That last phrase describes precisely what Eliot achieves in
Gwendolen Harleth and the society for which she stands. Unlike Eliot’s
other heroines, Gwendolen’s attractiveness is introduced as a question:
Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret form or
expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the
good or the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil;
else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed
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charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a
longing in which the whole being consents?
That beauty, here, is not a quality simply of physical form is obvious from
the additions to the first question: “and what was the secret which gave the
dynamic quality to her glance?” Somehow Gwendolen’s aesthetic power is
at least partially under her control, a result of her own dynamic glance.
Perhaps it is this hint of inner intention as well as outer form that makes the
emergence of the moral corollary not so surprising: “was the good or evil
genius dominant in those beams?” In giving his preliminary answer to that
question, the speaker reveals himself to understand moral beauty as a matter
of vision and response, as well as of good and evil. Based on his own
reaction, the weight swings to the negative side: “Probably evil; else why was
the effect that of unrest rather than that of undisturbed charm? Why was the
wish to look again felt as a coercion and not as a longing in which the whole
being consents?” (35). The questioner assesses the moral quality of the
beauty before him based upon his own wish to reject or accept its unsettling
effect on himself.
These particular questions are asked by Daniel Deronda as he watches
Gwendolen, a spoiled though soon-to-be impoverished young lady, gambling.
Daniel is like two other Eliot heroes, Adam Bede and Felix Holt—he shares
their understanding of feminine beauty as a melding of moral and physical
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perfection. He will demand the restfulness of that “consent with his entire
being” in his final assessment of beauty. What causes his unrest is “some
secret of form or expression” in her glance, the sense of something hidden,
either in its physical appeal or in the character of the object. Gwendolen,
then, is in contradiction to those heroines whose beauty is easily
acknowledged because it is transparent, because their gazes and faces are
“open” and their soul glows in concert with and through their skin. But this
assessment of beauty clearly depends upon the world the assessor exists in
and the standards by which he judges.
This disturbing quality, like Ruskin’s grotesque, makes Daniel work
to understand it. The narrator reports that in his eyes we see a “growing
expression of scrutiny, tending farther and farther away from the glow of
mingled undefined sensibilities forming admiration” (38). The “inward
debate” causes the scrutiny which displaces the admiration, recalling
Dorothea Brooke’s painful “survey” of her husband. Debate and scrutiny,
both of which are intellectual—controlled and directed by the mind, leading
to the suspension of feeling—are the opposite of the admiration which is
formed by the “glow” (both internally felt and externally recognizable in the
face) of “mingled undefined sensibilities.” Admiration, and the beauty that
inspires it, has a more varied appeal or effect; the “consent” of the “whole
being” thus is an undefined consent, a unity of body and mind without
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articulating the feelings and thoughts beyond the recognition of “beauty,” or
marking any difference between the feelings and the thoughts. She is a
“problematic sylph,” however, because the “sensibilities” she activates are
“problematic” to the mind which experiences them (and cannot “consent to”)
either because they are disturbing in themselves or because those sensibilities
are in conflict (they don’t assent together). These contradictions are
demanding of those who see them—they arouse either scrutiny and debate,
reading or conscious interpretation, or, a defensiveness against them.
For Daniel, Gwendolen possesses something more disturbing than
doubleness. Roulette brings out “something of the demon” (408) in her. This
is in part some sense of her moral culpability in gambling itself, but that
“demonic force” that possessed her “when she took him in her resolute
glance and turned away a loser from the gaming-table” also seems to be
associated with her beauty and its power to affect him. Her beauty is “like
original works of art: for the first time they are almost always met with
question.” Such “originality” in art is more likely to be modem, to challenge
safe or accepted conceptions of traditional beauty. Something like Ruskin’s
noble grotesque, which prompts the observer to think, to evaluate. When
Daniel sees her wearing the diamonds after her marriage to the coldly sadistic
Mallinger Grandcourt, “the new imposingness of her beauty. . . flashed on
him as more unquestionable if not more thoroughly satisfactory than when he
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had seen her at the gaming-table” (459). Like one of those “original works of
art,” Gwendolen’s worth, her beauty, has become “unquestionable,” but like
the noble grotesque it still does not “satisfy.” Clearly, this hesitation upon
Daniel’s part to “consent” to the effect of her beauty is manifestly due to the
moral ambiguity of her character. But it is not the fact of her moral weakness
that is so disturbing; it is the coexistence of that weakness with her physical
beauty—it is the ambiguity of what she represents in the world. And thus,
what that world is.
Gwendolen is introduced as a challenge to interpretation, but as also a
demand to interpret. The description of Gwendolen as a sea-creature or a
serpent comes as part of a recounting of others’ attempts to interpret her, to
read her as Ruskin read Turner’s painting. The narrator is the first to notice
her role-playing: “The Nereid in sea-green robes and silver ornaments, with a
pale sea-green feather fastened in silver falling backward over her green hat
and light brown hair, was Gwendolen Harleth.” Another observer phrases
her performance less elegantly: “she has set herself up as a sort of serpent
now . . . and winds her neck about a little more than usual.” On being asked
whether she is pretty, one Mr Vandemoodt combines patronizing platitude
with its cynical reproof: “Very. A man might risk hanging for her—I mean a
fool might.” Another observer is appreciative of her implied wit: “Woman
was tempted by a serpent, why not man?” He also finds her eyes and nose
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attractive in their “e n se m b le the conscious design of her dress, the
“ensemble du s e r p e n treflecting a tint of artificiality onto the arrangement
of her features. The same speaker defends her paleness as “warm” and
“healthy,” her nose “distracting,” and of her mouth, there “never was a
prettier” (41). Another man in contrast finds her mouth “self-complacent, as
if it knew its own beauty—the curves are too immovable.” That critic likes
“a mouth that trembles more” (41), a mouth that signals feminine
vulnerability cl ear-1 y. The woman, the dowager, thinks her “odious” and
thinks it’s “wonderful what unpleasant girls get into vogue” (41), accusing
Gwendolen of unwarrantedly claiming undue attention, but also wondering at
the tastes of people who would put her so “in vogue.” We see here that
Gwendolen is a creature of her society (and fit for it)—wishing to claim its
attention and able to serve as conversational meat: her beauty is the kind to
be discussed, analyzed, debated. These efforts of her critics, however, are
themselves as “performed” and as artificial as Gwendolen’s appearance
before them.
Key to interpreting all of these performances is their setting: she is
gambling “not in the open air under a southern sky, tossing coppers on a
ruined wall, with rags about her limbs” (35). This “not in” suggests that the
“natural” or picturesque scene would be the appropriate one to contain the
object of such aesthetic or moral discourse and that the creature so described,
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using “coppers” on a “mined wall,” and in “rags” that delineate its wearer’s
“limbs,” is the proper subject of moral question as well. Instead, Gwendolen
is “in one of the splendid resorts which the enlightenment of the ages has
prepared for the same species of pleasure at a heavy cost of gilt moldings,
dark-toned colour and chubby nudities, all correspondingly heavy.” The
“enlightenment of the ages” has not solved the moral and aesthetic dilemma
posed by the mstic scene, but instead has merely transferred them to a
different setting, at the “cost” of both the bad taste of such heavy, gaudy
decorativeness but also the “heavy” moral cost (gilt/guilt) of abandoning
those concerns the juxtaposition suggests.
In contrast, Mirah, the destitute Jewish singer, is a representation of
beauty along more traditional lines. Both typically and vitally beautiful in
Ruskin’s terms,4 she is something like his ideal girl or Queen. Mirah is, of
course, physically beautiful, but that beauty is interesting in how it combines
ideas of unity and vitality. Unlike Gwendolen, who seems to be marked by
her doubleness, the conflict inside her that Daniel can read, “Mirah’s was not
a nature that would bear dividing against itself’ (427). Her emotions and
thoughts are readable in her face, and she practices no duplicity. Daniel
muses,
Perhaps her ease of manner was due to something more than the
simplicity of her nature. The circumstances of her life had made her
think of everything she did as work demanded from her, in which
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affectation had nothing to do; and she had begun her work before self-
consciousness was bom. (421)
This kind of poise is related to the “happiness” that Ruskin wishes to see in
all girls. This ease of manner and openness indicate, in Ruskin’s terms, “vital
beauty,” the beauty of living feeling, of feeling to which the observer has
clear access. Ruskin likens such openness of manner and feeling to flowers,
and the passivity of such a reference is seen in her hostess, Mrs Meyrick’s
description of Mirah’s personality:
It is not her nature to run into planning and devising: only to submit.
See how she submitted to that father! It was a wonder to herself how
she found the will and contrivance to mn away from him. About
finding her mother, her only notion is to trust: since you were sent to
save her and we are good to her, she trusts that her mother will be
found in the same unsought way. And when she is talking I catch her
feeling like a child. (265)
The ability to convey her feelings so clearly and easily that they can be
caught “like a child” is related here to a simple and passive personality.
Mirah “submits” and “trusts,” not merely because “planning and devising”
have failed her, but because such is “her nature.” She is flowerlike in her
dependence upon those around her to not crash her underfoot, as many in the
world would feel no compunction of doing to a small Jewish girl.5 But
Mirah is not all trust; she guards herself. Her convictions about marriage are
as much about “her nature” and protecting that nature as they are about
religious doctrine: “and even if love won her consent to marry a man who
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was not of her race and religion, she would never be happy in acting against
that strong native bias which would reign in her conscience as remorse”
(427). Daniel recognizes this conviction and admires it: the “image of Mirah
changing” (521) is what he fears most. She is what he wants to be: “Mirah’s
religion was of one fibre with her affections, and had never presented itself to
her as a set of propositions” (410). Dorothea Brooke would envy her: for
Mirah, knowledge is feeling.
Gwendolen and Mirah are foils of one another, and Daniel at times
sees them in that way. After witnessing society’s indifference to Mirah’s
worth, “he felt a transient renewal of his first repulsion from Gwendolen, as if
she and her beauty and her failings were to blame for the undervaluing of
Mirah as a woman—a feeling something like class animosity” (619). The
differences between the stories of their beauty is powerful in itself, but they
also both exist within a social context. Daniel briefly identifies Gwendolen
with the society that produces her, the society that “undervalues” the more
valuable Mirah. Gwendolen’s beauty, perhaps in its “troubling” nature more
easily invokes such a reading. However, Mirah’s beauty, though associated
so strongly with her Jewishness, is portrayed as a transparent and universal
good—one needing no explanation.
If we look at Daniel’s choice of Mirah in Ruskin’s aesthetic terms we
can read it as a decision between two kinds of artistic value, each implying a
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different hermeneutic: the beautiful and the grotesque. Late in the novel we
see Daniel considering both women:
.. . sometimes with a sweet irresistible hopefulness that the very best
of human possibilities might befall him—the blending of complete
personal love in one current with a larger duty; and sometimes again
in a mood of rebellion (what human creature escapes it?) against
things in general because they are thus and not otherwise, a mood in
which Gwendolen and her equivocal fate moved as busy images of
what was amiss in the world along with the concealments which he
had felt as a hardship in his own life, and which were acting in him
now under the form of an afflicting doubtfulness about the mother
who had announced herself coldly and still kept away. (685-686)
The desire, stated early, for the “consent of his entire being” is made possible
in the choice of Mirah: “the very best of human possibilities”—“the blending
of complete personal love in one current with a larger duty.” But Mirah in
herself, the blending of complete personal goodness, both in her inner
character and in physical attractiveness, represents the ease of this choice.
Mirah is beauty; the life he will live with her will be a beautiful one.
Gwendolen, in contrast, represents what he “rebels” against: “things in
general because they are thus and not otherwise.” His protest against
“things” as “they are,” against the world as it is, is tied to his idea of
Gwendolen who has become associated with “what was amiss in the world
along with the concealments which he had felt as a hardship in his own life.”
Daniel associates Gwendolen not only with the “concealments” of his mother
in particular, but with the concealments of all women, no matter their
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reasons, and with the performances and self-indulgences of all people—with
the moral complexity of life itself.
The strong appeal this unsatisfactory life makes to his sympathy
draws him toward Gwendolen during her marital crisis: “Gwendolen’s
pleading—a painful urging of something vague and difficult, irreconcilable
with pressing conditions, and yet cruel to resist” (625). In his choice of
Mirah, of the beautiful, of the clearly motivated life of political idealism—a
life to be spent away from England—Daniel seems to be choosing the easy
path, or at least an outmoded one. He rejects “something vague and difficult”
although the urging is “painful” and is “cruel to resist.” Daniel chooses a
world that in large part he has already read competently. His only challenge,
though it too is an imposing one, is to persuade others to read it as he does.
Choosing Gwendolen, choosing the grotesque, would have been to choose
England, a world that still remains to be read, or at least read in such a way
that it challenges its readers too work towards moral and social change. In
such a contrast, he could be accused of rejecting England and her daughter
because they are “vague and difficult.”
“I Have No Sympathy”: Representing Mirah
But there are also moments when the representation of Mirah seems
overdone, especially the emphasis on her traditionally sentimental features.
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One description pictures her as a cameo: “the brown-black drapery, the white
face with small, small features and dark, long-lashed eyes” (228). The
repetition of “small” is almost cloying. Another portrait of her reinforces the
impression:
Her little woman’s figure as she laid her delicate chilled hands
together one over the other against her waist, and went a step
backward while she leaned her head forward as if not to lose her sight
of his face, was unspeakably touching. (231)
We see here too the notice given to her smallness: “her little woman’s figure”
and her “delicate” hands. But what seems overdone is the sentimental pose
she is cast in: the folding of her hands against her waist, the movement of her
body backward while her head leans forward “as if not to lose sight of his
face,” is a pose of appeal, and if the appeal is not obvious enough we are told
it “was unspeakably touching.” A similar scene describes Mirah singing:
Mirah crossed her little feet and hands in her easiest attitude, and then
lifted up her head at an angle which seemed to be directed to some
invisible face bent over her, while she sang a little hymn of quaint
melancholy intervals, with syllables that really seemed childish
lisping to her audience; but the voice in which she gave it forth had
gathered even a sweeter, more cooing tenderness than was heard in
her other songs. (423)
The “little feet and hands” would not be so irritating perhaps if it were not for
the physical attitude and the quality of the voice: she is posed as if singing to
angels, or more likely, to her dead mother, while her style of singing is as
stereotypical—“childish lisping” in “a sweeter, more cooing tenderness” than
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usual. She is untrained child and bird at once. Her own words too can tell
against her: “‘Thoughts,’ said Mirah; ‘thoughts that come like the breeze and
shake me—bad people, wrong things, misery—and how they might touch our
life’” (723). “Bad people, wrong things, misery”: this is the sophisticated
vocabulary of a moral thinker!
The emphasis on her size and the sentimentality of her posing are so
clearly a simple appeal to the reader’s feeling. In fact, even other characters,
like the Meyrick sisters who have “adopted” her, recognize the artificiality of
her story: “Mab says our life has become like a fairy tale, and all she is afraid
of is that Mirah will turn into a nightengale again and fly away from us”
(409). Daniel also falls into diminutive adjectives and bird metaphors:
It was a delight to have rescued this child acquainted with sorrow, and
to think of having placed her little feet in protected paths. The
creature we help to save, though only a half-reared linnet, bruised and
lost by the wayside—how we watch and fence it, and dote on its signs
of recovery! Our pride becomes loving, our self is a not-self for
whose sake we become virtuous, when we set to some hidden work of
reclaiming a life from misery and look for our triumph in the secret
joy—“This one is the better for me.” (428)
Daniel tells Mirah’s story twice. First, she is a child who must be “rescued”
which involves placing “her little feet in protected paths.” Second, she is an
equally childish bird, “a half-reared linnet, bruised and lost by the wayside.”
Its rescue forms part of “our” pride and delight, though the suggestion that
“we watch and fence it” in its “recovery,” is disturbing when associated with
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an adult human being. The egregiousness of the sentimental presentation
here is only highlighted by that sentence’s exclamation point.
Daniel representation of Mirah’s story to Gwendolen is less
melodramatic in execution. He summarizes:
She has had an unhappy life. Her troubles began in early childhood,
and she has grown up among very painful surroundings. But I think
you will say that no advantages could have given her more grace and
truer refinement... .1 have not any precise knowledge. But I know
that she was on the brink of drowning herself in despair. (493).
This is melodrama in summary. He tells of his “saving” of Mirah “quietly”:
“Some ray or other came—which made her feel that she ought to live—that it
was good to live.” Daniel uses general terms, not descriptions from the
everyday or the individual, but the general and the metaphoric (some ray or
other) to make this story compelling. Gwendolen complains “impatiently”:
“Those people are not to be pitied... .1 have no sympathy with women who
are always doing right. I don’t believe in their great sufferings.” Many of the
novel’s readers agree.
“A True Unison of the Grotesque with the Realistic Power”:
Representing Gwendolen
In contrast, the representations of Gwendolen and her niche in society
seem to illustrate Ruskin’s proclamation of “the dawn of a new era of art, in a
true unison of the grotesque with the realistic power” (5: 137). As we’ve
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seen, Gwendolen’s beauty is of a more ambiguous nature than Mirah’s and so
is her personality. From the first it is clear that she does not possess the
unified loveliness of body and soul, and neither does she understand the
world in such a transparent way. In contrast, she is presented as a creature of
layers. Gwendolen’s education emphasized performance as natural due: “two
years at a showy school, where on all occasions of display she had been put
foremost” which “had only deepened her sense that so exceptional a person
as herself could hardly remain in ordinary circumstances or in a social
position less than advantageous” (52). Such a school has taught her to take
such “performances” as posing as Saint Cecilia or Hermione seriously as an
expression of talent. Gwendolen performs, imagines scenes, and demands
that others not only see them with her but also admire her performance, or
“display.” Tellingly, she likes the “pictures that maybe anything”—they
may be used as “anything” her imagined scenes need. This preference on the
one hand shows a strong imagination, but it also carries a suggestion of
“unrootedness”—just as her things may be anything, so too, perhaps, may she
be. In her lack of appreciation for the relations between things (what things
really are, where things belong) she seems to be preparing herself for the
ornamental life o f Mrs. Transome.
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Gwendolen is not presented as an evil character, though Daniel
occasionally resorts to such terminology. But her character faults are part
and parcel of her fractured nature. Even her good points are dubious:
Gwendolen’s nature was not remorseless, but she liked to make her
penances easy, and now that she was twenty and more, some of her
native force had turned into a self-control by which she guarded
herself from penitential humiliation. There was more show of fire
and will in her than ever, but there was more calculation underneath
it. (53-4)
Unlike Mirah, who has no desire to do wrong which must be so guarded
against, Gwendolen’s moral “calculation” is an effort to protect against her
own future awareness of having done wrong. She is aware of her present self
and its potentially “wrong” impulses, and a future self which will cause her
pain in remembrance—as she is has already experienced in memories like her
“infelonious murder” of her sister’s canary-bird, a recollection which “had
always made her wince” (53). The horror of seeing herself as less than
perfect leads to her self-control. The superficiality of such morality is echoed
in the her conception of social duties. Gwendolen complains that her sister
“has no ear for music, or language, or anything else. It would be much better
for her to be ignorant, mamma: it is her role, she would do it well” (58). Her
words here signal the artificiality of the social life with which she is familiar:
people have roles rather than goals or duties. The French version of the word
makes the idea even more affected—it is performed even in the saying of it.
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After her marriage, Gwendolen no longer finds performance so
pleasing. Part of her discomfort with it is her particular audience:
Constantly she had to be on the scene as Mrs Grandcourt, and to feel
herself watched in that part by the exacting eyes of a husband who
had found a motive to exercise his tenacity—that of making his
marriage answer all the ends he chose, and with the more
completeness the more he discerned any opposing will in her. (608)
Their superior neighbor Mrs Arrowpoint in this scene claims to have “always
noticed that doubleness in her” (608). This artificial, repetitive life echoes
the false spirituality Ruskin describes in the 1872 Preface to “Of Queens’
Gardens”6:
Day after day the same pattern of thinking was repeated. There came
nothing to change the situation—no new elements in the sketch—only
a recurrence which engraved it. The May weeks went on into June,
and still Mrs Grandcourt was outwardly in the same place, presenting
herself as she was expected to do in the accustomed scenes, with the
accustomed grace, beauty, and costume; from church at one end of the
week, through all the scale of desirable receptions, to opera at the
other. Church was not markedly distinguished in her mind from the
other forms of self-presentation, for marriage had included no
instruction that enabled her to connect liturgy and sermon with any
larger order of the world than that of unexplained and perhaps
inexplicable social fashions. While a laudable zeal was labouring to
carry the light of spiritual law up the alleys where law is chiefly
known as the policeman, the brilliant Mrs Grandcourt, condescending
a little to a fashionable Rector and conscious of a feminine advantage
over a learned Dean, was, so far as pastoral care and religious
fellowship were concerned, in as complete a solitude as a man in a
lighthouse. (666-67)
As she has no sense of connection, Eliot cannot represent it (at least not in
this novel), and she has no Adam Bede to see her that way fo r us. This
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description of her desperately empty life in society asks for our sympathy
(and in a much more skillful way than the descriptions of Mirah’s poor little
feet), but it also enables us to judge. She is performing her role rather than
living her life, a distinction that Gwendolen has come to recognize with or
even as pain. But this life is also an extension of the one she used to accept
fairly happily. Even more damning, though, is her distance from any other
kind of life. Her ignorance of others’ “laudable zeal” in improving the lives
of the poor would be as strange to her as other forms of “pastoral care and
religious fellowship.” Like the unfortunate girls of Ruskin’s preface, her
experience of spiritual life is “condescending a little to a fashionable Rector
and conscious of a feminine advantage over a learned Dean.” She is “in as
complete solitude as a man in a lighthouse,” because even in her disgust with
her personal experience of social performance and position, she still in
general lives in such an isolated world, non-connected—she still reads other
people in as reductive a way.
The doubleness of Gwendolen’s existence is eventually realized in
what she herself perceives as the splitting of her personality at the climax of
her marriage to Grandcourt, his death by drowning:
.. . and I wished him to be dead. And yet it terrified me. I was like
two creatures. I could not speak—I wanted to kill—it was as strong
as thirst—and then directly—I felt beforehand I had done something
dreadful, unalterable—that would make me like an evil spirit. And it
came—it came. (756)
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This splitting is over and above her social role of elegantly married lady. The
“two creatures” she becomes at the end of the novel have little to do with
worldiness. The surface creature here is a woman who is so terrified of not
only her husband but more importantly of her own potential guilt that she
cannot act. But the other Gwendolen is no ideal “real” version of herself
which is correspondingly strong and good. Instead that other creature is one
of protest against the particularities of her personal position: she “wanted to
kill—it was as strong as thirst.” Perhaps this moral weakness of both
Gwendolens corresponds to the unity of Mirah’s goodness, her loveliness of
body and soul. Perhaps Gwendolen’s artificiality throughout and her
extremity at the end of the novel is yet another warning against the
persuasions of physical beauty. But the representation of Gwendolen, flawed
in both her surface and her depths appears rather to be of a kind with the
work of the author of Adam Bede.
Evaluating Daniel, Daniel Evaluating
Though it is not clear at first, the opening of the novel constructs the
aesthetic question (“Was she beautiful or not beautiful?”) as one of
perspective. There is no omniscient narrator here informing us of
Gwendolen’s beauty, its provenance, its general effects, its secrets, or its
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probable, though not certain, future. Instead, this beauty can be named only
through the psychology of another character, and one who is more Ruskinian
than objective or scientific. The brief delay in locating these questions within
the consciousness of a character allows us a moment when they act as the
novel’s definition of beauty, as questions which will resonate through the
story and set the terms of its moral constructions—even though they are the
idiosyncratic concerns of one particular character, and one who, as we’ll see,
reads the beautiful very differently from those in the society in which he has
matured.7 Although the novel opens with a discussion of Gwendolen and her
effect upon others, it is actually the character who observers her who carries
the onus of moral influence. The way in which Daniel responds to others, the
way in which he locates himself in the world, the way in which he chooses
his mate, the representation of all of these moments construct Daniel as a
particular kind of reader—a Ruskinian reader, a feminine one.
Daniel’s boyhood is framed in a way that echoes Eliot’s previous
development of female characters. In particular, the examination of the way
in which his inner character and outer appearance work together signals his
role as moral object. In the description of his “reserve” on discovering the
mystery o f his past:
Everyone, his tutor included, set him down as a reserved boy, though
he was so good-humoured and unassuming, as well as quick both at
study and sport, that nobody called his reserve disagreeable. Certainly
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his face had a great deal to do with that favourable interpretation; but
in this instance the beauty of the closed lips told no falsehood. (213)
First the narrator tells us that the “reserve” is the result of a “check on his
naturally strong bent towards the formation of intimate friendships,"
reassuring us that Daniel might be reserved, but not cold. And then the
narrator tells us that Daniel’s reserve is not “disagreeable,” in part due to his
“good-humoured and unassuming” behavior otherwise. These first signs that
signal personality are relatively ungendered, but then the narrator remarks on
his beauty: “Certainly his face had a great deal to do with that favourable
interpretation; but in this instance the beauty of the closed lips told no
falsehood” (213). Here Daniel is placed in the context of Hetty Sorrell or
Rosamond Vincy, female characters whose beauty did falsely signal their
inner character.
As a boy, Daniel is described in terms that emphasize his physical and
spiritual beauty. This description implies a certain femininity, not least in
making him the object of others’ gaze:
when he was thirteen he might have served as a model for any painter
who wanted to image the most memorable of boys: you could hardly
have seen his face thoroughly meeting yours without believing that
human creatures had done nobly in the past.
But significantly, his face is readable, and the message is man’s past and
potential nobility. Like Ruskin’s he queen, his very appearance has a
“consecrating power, and makes us shudder anew at all the grossness and
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basely-wrought griefs of the world, lest they should enter and defile” (205).
Daniel, with his “childlike face” is innocence, that innocence that is marked
by its separation from the harshness of the world. This femininity is made
even more explicit: “he had not lived with other boys, and his mind showed
the same blending of child’s ignorance with surprising knowledge which is
oftener seen in bright girls” (205). This is knowledge limited by ignorance,
demarcated by it, and thus “surprising.” Also like bright girls, the nobility he
signals is the nobility of innocent and relatively passive intelligence, not the
nobility of deeds, actions, courage.
As with Dorothea, Daniel’s search for wider knowledge does not
compromise his immediate sympathy:
There had sprung up in him a meditative yearning after wide
knowledge which is likely always to abate ardour in the fight for prize
acquirement in narrow tracks... .Still Mr Fraser’s high opinion of the
lad had not been altogether belied by the youth: Daniel had the stamp
of rarity in a subdued fervour of sympathy, an activity of imagination
on behalf of others, which did not show itself effusively, but was
continually seen in acts of considerateness that struck his companions
as moral eccentricity. (217-8)
Unlike Ruskin’s distrust in "wide knowledge" as a distraction from the
intimate immediacy of the flow of events in the near and current world,
Daniel’s "yearning after" such knowledge seems to coexist with, and perhaps
even to assist in, his "subdued fervour of sympathy." His "wider knowledge"
does not lead to the dispersal of his sympathetic activity "effusively" in some
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misdirected and dissipated spray. Instead Daniel’s sympathetic activity, both
imaginative and in the world is concrete, local, and directed, "constantly seen
in acts of considerateness that struck his companions as moral eccentricity."
Others can’t really “see” sympathy or the activity of the imagination and so
are only left with acts of what they interpret to be “consideration” though that
inferred impulse is not always clearly linked to any prompting. As his
friends cannot see his body or imagination at work, so we too would have to
“divine” them in the actual world where narrators do not exist to help us out.
The equivocal nature of reading is not only a problem for us; Daniel,
like Dorothea, has difficulty reconciling the knowledge he is being given
about the world to his hopes for how he would like to understand it. Like
her, Daniel is presented as searching for a way to use knowledge beyond the
obvious: "instead of regarding studies as instruments of success" he
"hampered himself with the notion that they were to feed motive and
opinion" (219). Daniel understands knowledge in terms familiar from Ruskin
and Eliot’s admonitions to girls: it is not for "effect," but for "motive.” He
wishes to gain "insight into the principles which form the vital connections of
knowledge" (220), a desire in conflict with the training provided by
university:
He was ceasing to care for knowledge—he had no ambition for
practice—unless they could both be gathered up into one current with
his emotions; and he dreaded, as if it were a dwelling-place of lost
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souls, that dead anatomy of culture which turns the universe into a
mere ceaseless answer to queries, and knows not everything, but
everything else about everything—as if one would be ignorant of
nothing concerning the scent of violets except the scent itself for
which one had no nostril. (413)
This desire to experience knowledge as something like bodily feeling is
posed as a problem for Daniel principally because it concerns him in his
choice of a profession, in his choice of the path that he will supposedly
follow the rest of his life. Eliot’s heroines, Ruskin’s girls, none of them have
to take such activity into consideration. Their career is in itself cast as a
sympathetic one—running the domestic space. The world of masculine
profession, however, is often constructed as in opposition to sympathy, and to
choose one would be to accept the “dead anatomy of culture” that school and
the professional world construct through their excision of feeling, like the
amputation of a nostril, from knowledge of the world. The professions
concern intellectual knowledge only—propositions about not experience of.
Daniel’s dissatisfaction with the world, not surprisingly, becomes a
concern with his lack of place:
But how and whence was the needed event to come?—the influence
that would justify partiality, and making him what he longed to be yet
was unable to make himself?—an organic part of social life, instead
of roaming in it like a yearning disembodied spirit, stirred with a
vague social passion, but without fixed local habitation to render
fellowship real? .. .He found some fault in his birth and the way he
had been brought up, which had laid no special demands on him and
given him no fixed relationships except one of a doubtful kind....
(413-4)
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Although his sympathy is rooted in affection, he himself does not feel rooted
to any place. Ruskin’s Queen in contrast, in her role as wife and mother,
does not have to choose a career. Nor does she have to search for any
particular place from which to act: she carries her “home with her wherever
she goes.” Women build their own fellowship, daily making it “real,” in their
domestic and communal interactions. Daniel is a queen in search of his
garden, his garden from which he can act in the wider world.
But that fellowship he seeks will provide him affection not simply for
other people. When Gwendolen comments that she “should have thought”
Daniel cared “most about ideas, knowledge, wisdom, and all that,” Daniel
responds,
But to care about them is a sort of affection. .. .Call it attachment,
interest, willingness to bear a great deal for the sake of being with
them and saving them from injury. Of course it makes a difference if
the objects of interest are human beings; but generally in all deep
affections the objects are a mixture—half persons and half ideas—
sentiments and affections flow in together. (470-1)
Daniel talks about ideas as if they were people, describing his relationship to
them in almost paternalistic terms: “to bear a great deal” for them and to
“save them.” But then he makes a more complicated statement: that “in all
deep affections the objects are a mixture—half persons and half ideas.” Deep
affection, then, is a sort of reading, or depends upon a sort of reading of the
beloved object: both as an individual being and as an association with some
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idea. Whether or not the reading conies before the response is a question that
Daniel himself poses: “I wonder whether one oftener learns to love real
objects through their representations, or the representations through the real
objects.” One answer is his memory of his love for his old home. Ashe
points to a feature of its architecture, “a lovely capital made by the curled
leaves of greens, showing their reticulated under-side with the firm gradual
swell of its central rib,” Daniel echoes a Ruskinian perspective: “When I was
a little fellow these capitals taught me to observe, and delight in, the structure
of leaves” (476). As for Dorothea, however, feeling alone is not enough:
“The few may find themselves in it by an elevation of feeling, but for those
who struggle for our wisdom, the higher life must be a region in which the
affections are clad with knowledge” (508). Beauty alone will not suffice for
Daniel, but beauty plus knowledge—that Mirah can offer.
In several places, Daniel sees Mirah as just such an association with
ideas. When he first sees her bent on suicide at the edge of the Thames, she
is “a figure which might have been an impersonation of misery,” with her
gaze “of immovable, statue-like despair” (227). So begins his association of
her with concepts. Soon after the association becomes less clear but more
significant:
The light was not such that he could distinctly discern the expression
of her features or her glance, but they were distinctly before him
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nevertheless—features and a glance which seemed to have given a
fuller meaning for him to the human face. (233)
Although he can hardly see her face, he apprehends it as significant, as giving
“a fuller meaning for him to the human face.” She stands not only for certain
moods, but also for all faces. That significance is also clearly a moral one:
“Her voice, her accent, her looks—all the sweet purity that clothed her as
with a consecrating garment made him shrink the more from giving her,
either ideally or practically, an association with what was hateful or
contaminating” (247). That purity is as much a product of his mind as it is of
Mirah herself. He wished to keep his associations of her clean and light—
thus his wish that she will never change.
Most importantly, Mirah comes to represent Judaism to Daniel. At
first this representation is something separate from his own hopes and plans:
But Mirah, with her terrified flight from one parent, and her yearning
after the other, had flashed on him the hitherto neglected reality that
Judaism was something still throbbing in human lives, still making for
them the only conceivable vesture of the world. (411)
Her religion strikes him as acting like a protective garment, echoing his
desire for affection clad with knowledge. Here she is the occasion for him to
feel sympathy for actual living Jews, but later that association becomes more
personal:
Holding her little hands tightly clasped and looking at Mrs Meyrick
with beseeching, she seemed to Deronda a personification of that
spirit which impelled men after a long inheritance of professed
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Catholicism to leave wealth and high place, and risk their lives in
flight, that they might join their own people and say, ‘I am a Jew.’
(426)
The spirit she personifies is one that he will identify in himself—one that will
impel him to make his own proclamations of identity.
Like Dorothea, Daniel’s desire for knowledge as feeling leaves him
with a resistance to maintaining critical distance. He sees his potentially
painful family history as a solution to that problem:
The disclosure might bring its pain, indeed the likelihood seemed to
be all on that side; but if it helped him to make his life a sequence
which would take the form of duty—if it saved him from having to
make an arbitrary selection where he felt no preponderance of desire?
Still more he wanted to escape standing as a critic outside the
activities of men, stiffened into the ridiculous attitude of self-assigned
superiority. (526)
As Dorothea suffered when forced to “survey” her husband once mentally
removed from him, so Daniel sees fellowship as a closeness that will prevent
such judgment. Smith again and Hume bystander—so little body, so
controlled a body. But avoiding the pain of critical distance makes acting on
his sympathy difficult. The wideness of his sympathy, which according to
Ruskin, and perhaps even to Eliot herself in other instances, should be the
precondition to effective moral action, now causes Daniel difficulty:
It happened that the very vividness of his impressions had often made
him the more enigmatic to his friends, and had contributed to an
apparent indefmiteness in his sentiments. His early-awakened
sensibility and reflectiveness had developed into a many-sided
sympathy, which threatened to hinder any present course of action: as
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soon as he took up any antagonism, though only in thought, he
seemed to himself like the Sabine warriors in the memorable story—
with nothing to meet his spear but flesh of his flesh, and objects that
he loved. (412)
Daniel’s “vividness of his impressions” should enable him to sympathetically
identify with many others. And it does. The problem is not in the immediacy
of sympathy, of reacting to individuals. The problem lies in his ability to
quickly transfer that sympathy to the other participants in any scene. Not
only does he read every participant in this way, but when he does so he also
imagines himself as a participant in the scene being read by someone else.
As that reader, he pities himself for meeting nothing with “his spear but flesh
of his flesh”—flesh of his imagination, at least temporarily. Such a problem
is different from Ruskin’s understanding of the obstacles to sympathetic
action for women: “His imagination had so wrought itself into the habit of
seeing things as they probably appeared to others, that a strong partisanship,
unless it were against an immediate oppression, had become an insincerity
for him.” So, it is not wider knowledge, but wider sympathy that prevents his
action. Only in the “immediate” he can act.
This “many-sided sympathy” does not produce a completely neutral
or objective stalemate. The position he takes as a young adult is ultimately
that of a proper English gentleman as constructed decades before by Adam
Smith8:
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And yet his fear of falling into unreasoning narrow hatred made a
check for him: he apologized for the heirs of privilege; he shrank with
dislike from the loser’s bitterness and the denunciatory tone of the
unaccepted innovator. A too reflective and diffusive sympathy was in
danger of paralyzing in him that indignation against wrong and that
selectness of fellowship which are the conditions of moral force;. . .
(413)
His “confused” bias is on the side of the worldly. His sentiments and
objections are class ones. The hint about fellowship is followed by a
foreshadowing of the plot:
and in the last few years of confirmed manhood he had become so
keenly aware of this that what he most longed for was either some
external event, or some inward light, that would urge him into a
definite line of action, and compress his wandering energy. (413)
While Gwendolen and her world would seem only to offer more of the
same—more opportunity for diffuse sympathy and little help in guidance to
one particular course of action—Mirah, Mordecai and the world made
available to him by his realization of his own Jewish ancestry will provide
him with a course of action so particular is has its own name—Zionism.
The benefit for Daniel of choosing his heritage, of choosing Mirah
and her new-found brother, the sage Mordecai, is not only the fellowship and
purpose clad with affection that they offer and represent. What they offer
most is a way to see the world as beautiful. For Daniel, Mordecai—a
character as troubling to readers, if not more so than Mirah—acts as an ideal
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representative of combining the real and the imaginary, the near and the far.
Daniel says of him:
[he] had the chief elements of greatness: a mind consciously,
energetically moving with the larger march of human destinies, but
not the less full of conscience and tender heart for the footsteps that
tread near and need a leaning-place; capable of conceiving and
choosing a life’s task with far-off issues, yet capable of the
unapplauded heroism which turns off the road of achievement at the
call of the nearer duty whose effect lies within the beatings of the
hearts that are close to us, as the hunger of the unfledged bird to the
breast of its parent. (604-5)
This split in Mordecai’s attention places him at the center of a circle whose
circumference is the “larger march of human destinies,” a road which is
always pulled into an arc by his concern for those nearer to him. For Daniel,
once he knows his ancestry:
It was as if he had found an added soul in finding his ancestry—his
judgment no longer wandering in the maze of impartial sympathy, but
choosing, with the noble partiality which is man’s best strength, the
closer fellowship that makes sympathy practical—exchanging that
bird’s-eye reasonableness which soars to avoid preference and loses
all sense of quality, for the generous reasonableness of drawing
shoulder to shoulder with men of like inheritance. He wanted now to
be again with Mordecai, to pore forth instead of restraining his
feeling, to admit agreement and maintain dissent, and all the while to
find Mirah’s presence without... .(814)
Within the maze, his vision is confused. Above the maze, his sight of the
maze is clear, but he loses all connection to it. In ignoring the maze as it is,
in focusing on the part nearest to him, he makes of that part a new world with
Mirah, Mordecai, and himself in the center. Mirah, especially will provide an
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anchor while they sail together tackling the questions “of human destinies.”
Daniel rejects the disordered confusion of the maze and the too “superior”
order of the “bird’s eye” view in order to create his own order. He cannot
live or act as the omniscient narrator of a novel, nor act in a world that is
grotesque. He conceives of his work as not as movement within the maze to
disentangle it, to find its secret path, but as movement between the near and
far within it, a movement that lays out his own path.
Daniel inherits a useful discourse from his newfound family, “But I
think I can maintain my grandfather’s notion of separateness with
communication” (792), which provides him with a clear conception of the
world (the “separateness” of groups) and a clear relationship of its parts
(“communicating” across the distance between them). Thus he orders the
messy social space in his imagination, admittedly an ideal, but one which is
more clearly a compromise between than a transcending of the terms. Eliot
casts this vision of action and feeling in organic language:
The strongest tendencies of his nature were rushing in one current—
the fervent affectionateness which made him delight in meeting the
wish of beings near to him, and the imaginative need of some far-
reaching relation to make the horizon of his immediate, daily acts. It
has to be admitted that in this classical, romantic, world-historic
position of his, bringing as it were from its hiding-place his hereditary
armour. . . .(815)
Again, ordering equals demarcation. This is perspective from a located
center. He finds not a physical location, not an actual garden or a house, but
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like the Queen he makes a horizon from his position of being center. When
Daniel explains to Mordecai his acceptance of his new religion and people,
he echoes the novel’s opening plaint about Gwendolen’s beauty: “What I feel
now is—that my whole being is a consent to the fact. But it has been a
gradual accord between your mind and mine which has brought about that
full consent” (819). His consent to the “fact” of his identity is a consent to a
world of beautiful order.
His choice of Zionism is merely an extension of this earlier consent.
His vocation is to do for his people what he has done for himself:
The idea I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence
to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national
centre, such as the English have, though they are too scattered over
the face of the globe. That is the task which presents itself to me as a
duty: I am resolved to begin it, however feebly. I am resolved to
devote my life to it. At the least, I may awaken a movement in other
minds, such as has been awakened in my own. (875)
He extends that center of himself to a center for his people, at the moment a
center which is only a vision, but a powerful one that he hopes others will
join him in realizing.
In tackling such visionary work, Mirah becomes a helpful model. She
herself maintains a belief in the relation between beauty and truth. “The
rational Amy” Meyrick challenges her about the way in which she takes
“what is beautiful as if it were true.” Mirah replies that it is: “If people have
thought what is the most beautiful and the best thing, it must be true. It is
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always there.” Unlike the rational girl, Mirah believes in the reality of
thought, the presence of thought “always there” in the world somehow. And
this presence is a personal one, one that is near: “When the best thing comes
into our thoughts, it is like what my mother has been to me. She has been
just as really with me as all the other people about me—often more really
with me” (523). Mirah unites belief and thought with her affections—ideas
of good are as present to her as her absent mother. Mirah would have no
difficulty believing that Daniel’s “national center” is real.
A Romantic Theory of Perpetual Emotion: Judging Daniel Deronda
How do we read the choice Daniel makes and the very real
differences in the representation of the “Jewish section” and the “English
section” of the novel? Eliot herself seems well aware of such a response to
her novel, as at various points within it, the question of idealism and how to
judge it is explicitly raised. The central “problem” in these terms is Daniel
himself. The narrator disclaims the word romantic as not appropriate in
reference to our hero:
To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but
under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a
fervour which made him easily find poetry and romance among the
events of everyday life. And perhaps poetry and romance are as
plentiful as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic natures who
I suspect would in an age have regarded them as a dull form of
erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the
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microscope and even in railway carriages: what banishes them is the
vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the
apparatus of heaven and earth, form the farthest firmament to the
tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a
mind that has no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of
fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again
from the distant to the near? (245)
The distinction is between being and doing. Daniel is not “romantic”
himself: whatever the word means when used as an accusation, it is not a fit
description of his character. However, he does possess “a fervour which
made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of everyday life.”
Daniel’s relationship to romance is that he can find it, that he can read it as
existing in the world, something very like Dickens’s “romantic side of
familiar things.” The narrator then suggests that Daniel may be right, that
“poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in world,” but that it is
“phlegmatic natures” who are blind to them, “regarding” them instead as “a
dull form of erroneous thinking.” Such a perspective seems to claim that
these phlegmatic people may possess accurate thinking, perhaps even a
sophisticated modem apprehension of the world. But poetry and romance
“exist very easily in the same room with the microscope and even railway
carriages: what banishes them is the vacuum in gentlemen and lady
passengers.” Poetry and romance, the narrator claims, are not the result of an
ignorant understanding which has been defeated by such new miracles as
microscopes and the discovery of vacuum. Instead, it is the imaginative
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vacuum within the “gentleman and lady passengers” which causes them to be
unable to recognize not only past but also the present romance of the railway
they travel upon. But this phlegmatic regard has the power to “banish”
poetry and romance, both for themselves and for others. Such readers of the
world are not equipped with the sensibility to respond richly, to see and feel
the connection which “thrills from the near to the distant, and back again
from the distant to the near.” Daniel, unlike Ruskin’s girl readers, these
natures do not “enter into” the world they are reading, and by staying apart
from it, they create their version of the world as a more isolated and less
emotional place.
The narrator later returns to the question of moral energy and
quotidian detail, making a case for enthusiasm for the near and the familiar.
This paragraph precedes Daniel’s own hesitations of sympathy with regard to
the Jews with whom he is becoming involved:
But the fervour of sympathy with which we contemplate a grandiose
martyrdom is feeble compared with the enthusiasm that keeps
unslacked where there is no danger, no challenge—nothing but
impartial mid-day falling on commonplace, perhaps half-repulsive,
objects which are really the beloved ideas made flesh. Here
undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: —in the force of
imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating
among cloud-pictures. To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge
covering the earth, is an easier exercise of believing imagination than
to see its beginning in newspaper placards, staring at you from a
bridge beyond the cornfields; and it might well happen to most of us
dainty people that we were in the thick of the battle of Armageddon
without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of a little
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explosive smoke and struggling on the ground immediately about us.
(431)
In response to “roar” of pain and suffering we see the ordering of the
beautifying impulse. As a preface to Daniel’s concerns, the narrator returns
to the romance of the everyday, contrasting “grandiose martyrdom” and the
enthusiasm which must motivate itself in situations of “no danger, no
challenge—nothing but impartial mid-day falling on commonplace, perhaps
half-repulsive objects which are really the beloved ideas made flesh.” What
are these “commonplace, perhaps half-repulsive objects”? From the
immediate context, they appear to be the places and the people he is
encountering when visiting Mordecai and searching for Mirah’s brother. But
at this point, such places are not quite “beloved ideas” ready to be “made
flesh” for Daniel. That “grotesque” will become the beautiful for Daniel,
through its association with beloved ideas and people.
This mystery points to a major problem with evaluating the novel,
evaluating her defense of “Romance” or beauty. The grotesque is presented
as an English issue or a quality of the English—it’s represented in an English
context, a context erased when the narrator turns to Zionism, Mirah and
Mordecai). What this argument (or this version of it—Daniel’s application of
it) does to England—makes England the ugly contrast to the new people.
The “half-repulsive” commonplaces which Daniel observes are, in part,
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England itself. Sir Hugo, still potentially his father, and his family, are
beloved people, but they are not loved for the ideas they represent. What
ideas could the English represent? The novel does not offer an articulation of
some English good that would allow moral work there to begin. The
injunction to “Love thy neighbor” has not seemed to work, though this
passage and others like it are still attempting to build enthusiasm for that very
attitude. In contrast, for Daniel, through his love of two people, Mirah and
Mordecai, and through his love of an idea, Zionism, a “romantic” idea, the
previously repulsive signs of ignorance that he sees amongst the Jews of
London becomes acceptable and lovable if not empirically attractive. With
England it is the formerly and somewhat still attractive people who are
revealed to be “perhaps repulsive” now (though he would guard against such
a feeling from affection) because their “idea” (a blind “rationalism”) or there
lack of a better one, has been revealed. England is grotesque.
Which land is the scene of “martyrdom” and “romantic” epic action:
the East or England? Eliot does try to make the East and Easterners more of
the “mid-day,” but her success is a qualified one. Of course, there may not
be this contrast in the novel itself—such romantic martyrdom may merely be
one of our fictions, and any choice we make in ideas or the people and places
that represent them and what will be involved in their working out will be
quotidian and disappointing on such terms. But still, the mode of
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representation of Mirah makes his choice so easy to read as romantic and thus
“feeble” in comparison to the work to be done at home. Those who do not
recognize “the battle of Armageddon” as it rages around their daily life may
be the non-heroic types of Jew he meets in his wandering around London, but
the “we” whose obliviousness to the battle, not “being aware of anything
more than the annoyance of a little explosive smoke and struggling on the
ground immediately about us” could be just as easily the normative we of the
average English person.
In addition, the problem of misreading the world and its potential for
good is one that the novel most consistently locates in the English. Even
Daniel has to battle the social education which would impose a different
interpretation:
If he had read of this incident as having happened centuries ago in
Rome, Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, Cairo, to some young man as
himself, dissatisfied with his neutral life, and wanting some closer
fellowship, some more special duty to give him ardour for the
possible consequences of his work, it would have appeared to him
quite natural that the incident should have created a deep impression
on that far-off man, whose clothing and action would have been seen
in his imagination as part of an age chiefly known to us through its
more serious effects. Why should he be ashamed of his own agitated
feeling merely because he dressed for dinner, wore a white tie, and
lived among people who might laugh at his owning any conscience in
the matter as the solemn folly of taking himself too seriously?—that
bugbear of circles in which the lack of grave emotion passes for wit.
From such cowardice before modish ignorance and obtuseness,
Deronda shrank. (567)
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The challenge is to take today and the self “seriously” in defiance of circles
which see such an attitude at best as “solemn folly.” Not only does “the lack
of grave emotion pass for wit,” but the English of these circles, of which
Daniel is one, have not been trained to read the present world as the possible
location for great or significant events or feeling. The “clothing and action”
of other ages seem more appropriate to such feeling. These English need
such staging and costuming clues in order to “believe” in “serious effects.”
But that belief will only last as long as the mental visit to such an “age.” The
imagination needs to clothe today. Even though Daniel “shrank” before such
“modish ignorance and obtuseness” in general, he still finds himself asking
the question: “why should he be ashamed of his own agitated feeling merely
because he dressed for dinner, wore a white tie, and lived among people who
might laugh.” Perhaps Daniel has to find other people to live among in order
to silence this voice. Daniel is not like Dorothea here. He doesn’t have her
blindness—he needs to find it in his “new vision”—a controlling one.
But the fashionable “rational” voice is not the only one to consider
when judging the idealism of moral choice or the representation of it. There
is a critical position whose “scientific” reasoning is more sound, or at least
more attractive. As Daniel himself is aware, there is a “question of the
family likeness among the heirs of enthusiasm, whether prophets or dreamers
of dreams, whether the ‘Great benefactors of mankind, deliverers,’ or the
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devotees of phantasmal discovery -from the first believer in his own
unmanifested inspiration, down to the last inventor of an ideal machine which
will achieve perpetual motion.” An “objective” thinking person looking back
across history will be forced to acknowledge by its evidence that not all
idealistic choice is correct or successful choice. Although some creative
scientists have been “great benefactors of mankind,” many others have
wasted their lives on the chimera of the perpetual motion machine. More
troubling, is the “family resemblance” between “prophets” and mere
“dreamers of dreams,” a likeness, a fundamental connection which makes
judging of visionary belief based upon a sort of off-the-cuff statistical
analysis almost impossible. Hume’s recommendation of history as judge is
not an encouraging one, and trying to use it in the present is dangerous:
“Reduce the grandest type of man hitherto known to an abstract statement of
his qualities and efforts, and he appears in dangerous company: say that, like
Copernicus and Galileo, he was immovably convinced in the face of hissing
incredulity; but so is the contriver of perpetual motion. We cannot fairly try
the spirits by this sort of test.” Eliot warns us to beware letting that difficulty
and the fact of much mistaken belief to allow us to prejudge, to choose
satisfaction of rationality over the joy, perhaps a world-changing one, of
hope.
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And so we return to the problem of judgment and her argument for
error in Adam Bede. The qualifications for making such a decision from a
stronger critical position are much more stringent:
If we want to avoid giving the dose of hemlock or the sentence of
banishment in the wrong case, nothing will do but a capacity to
understand the subject-matter on which the immovable man is
convinced, and fellowship with human travail, both near and afar, to
hinder us from scanning any deep experience lightly.
To judge of the present we must study it and its actors. We must be familiar
with “the subject matter” under discussion but also we must possess a
“fellowship with human travail,” a sympathy with human work and hope, in
order to even begin to judge. We must identify with them and their trials in
the Humean and Ruskinian sense, “leaving man in particular” with his
various biases behind in order to understand. Hume in his essay on taste
claims that only history will reveal the final judgment of any work, a history
of many particular judgments from which the various biases will cancel each
other out. This may be true, but for Eliot’s narrator, that misses the point:
“Shall we say, ‘Let the ages try the spirits, and see what they are worth’?”
Those who are so concerned with judgment, with choosing the “correct”
course to follow, are more concerned with that correctness than with the
content and immediate effect of their choice. Instead, we should rely on our
own judgment, for “we are the beginning of the ages, which can only be just
by virtue of just judgments in separate human breasts”—separate yet
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combined. Yes, “the ages” will reveal the true prophets, but Eliot’s history is
not a collection of isolated individuals. Men are “separate yet combined,”
and that combination means that ideals can be communicated, that one
person’s reading of the world and its possibilities may persuade others to
share it. Eliot’s answer to Hume’s choice of history is to take history into our
own hands—to make it a record of our better selves.
Eliot offers Mordecai as potentially one such influential visionary. In
trying to decide the question of his “discipleship” to Mordecai, Daniel allows
for the possibility that “his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate
of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which
determines the consequences it believes in.” This is a compromise familiar to
Hume: the balancing between a rational “estimate of consequences” and an
emotional “passion.” Hume would most likely have been wary, as Daniel is,
of the “passionate belief that determines the consequences it believes in,” but
that belief offers the possibility of social and moral change through the
influence of felt ideas that would be much more amenable to the mood of
Eliot’s era. For this narrator, for Daniel, emotion has taken the leading role if
only for the moment: “in relation to human motives and actions, passionate
belief has a fuller efficacy. Here enthusiasm may have the validity of proof,
and, happening in one soul, give the type of what will one day be general.”
Feelings equal reality. Passion in this age is more persuasive than reason,
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and so can amend the world that reason has built. In a passage that seems
directed at those older thinkers, the narrator mocks philosophy that ignores
emotion:
The driest argument has its hallucinations, too hastily concluding that
its net will now at last be large enough to hold the universe. Men may
dream in demonstrations, and cut out an illusory world in the shape of
axioms, definitions, and propositions, with a final exclusion of fact
signed Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking will save us mortals from
mistake in our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be thought
about. And since the unemotional intellect may carry us into a
mathematical dreamland where nothing is but what is not, perhaps an
emotional intellect may have absorbed into its passionate vision of
possibilities some truth of what will be—the more comprehensive
massive life feeding theory with new material, as the sensibility of the
artist seizes combinations which science explains and justifies. At
any rate, presumptions to the contrary are not to be trusted. We must
be patient with the inevitable makeshift of our human thinking,
whether in its sum total or in the separate minds that have made the
sum. (571-2)
Any system of thought will miss some important element, perhaps especially
those “dry” arguments that assume that their intellectual “net will now be
large enough to hold the universe.” “Axioms, definitions, and propositions,”
even the final “Q.E.D.” are all as much “dreams” as more traditionally
visionary fare. The conclusion of such logic in fact is “a final exclusion of
fact,” blind to that exclusion both through the presuppositions of the logic,
and in the deciding power of any such systematic argumentation. .
Neither camp of thinkers has better than “imperfect apprehension of the
matter to be thought about.” All thinkers are in some way wrong. In that
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case, since the “mathematical dreamland” is a place “where nothing is but
what is not,” the narrator suggests that the “emotional intellect” will have a
different kind of error to contribute: “some truth of what will be.” This kind
of intellect may be even more valuable in the realm of human life, for “the
more comprehensive massive life,” is constantly absorbing more life,
“feeding theory with new material.” The emotional intellect, like the genius
of Ruskin’s artist will constantly revise its “theory” based upon continual
immersion in the flow of human events. After such narratorial enthusiasm,
the tone becomes more wry: “At any rate, presumptions to the contrary are
not to be trusted.” We cannot trust those who claim to read the world
correctly, but must instead, “be patient with the inevitable makeshift of our
human thinking whether in its sum total or in the separate minds that have
made the sum.” Whether we examine single human breasts or the collective
beliefs of common sense or the judgment of the ages, we must always
remember: they, we, are all in some way wrong. The question to ask is: what
wrong do you wish to be?
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Notes
1 The contrast is so striking that F.R. Leavis declared that the novel should be
halved, with the “good” part retitled Gwendolen Harleth and the rest (Daniel,
Mordecai, Mirah) thrown out. So committed was he to this idea that he
referred to the work as Gwendolen Harleth in his chapter on the novel.
2 Woman, as perceiver and as aesthetic object, is also out of step with the
artistic interests of the day in another way. Ruskin notes the change in
modem focus: “the admiration of mankind, in our times, has passed from
men to mountains, from human nature to natural phenomena” (5: 329).
Human Nature is precisely still the object of the Queen’s admiration. And
her concern is to make all of England her Garden—that most unnatural of
natural phenomena. One would think that Ruskin who praises in “Gardens”
domestication and who is primarily concerned there and elsewhere with
human morality would be daunted by such a change. But Ruskin defends this
shift away from the human: “instead of supposing the love of nature
necessarily connected with the faithlessness of the age, I believe it connected
properly with the benevolence and liberty of the age; that it is precisely the
most healthy element which distinctively belongs to us, and that out of it,
cultivated no longer in levity or ignorance, but in earnestness, and as a duty,
results will spring of an importance at present inconceivable; and lights arise,
which, for the first time in men’s history, will reveal to him the true nature of
his life, the true field of his energies, and the true revelations between him
and his Maker” (5: 379-80). “Nature” will convey God’s “true revelations”
to man. Woman, perhaps, can only convey man’s. In such passages, Ruskin
effectively redraws the boundaries of the Queen’s realm into precisely that
limited perimeter he was trying to expand.
In the world of modem landscape her beauty (in contrast to the Grotesque)
and her perception (limited, no matter how “true”) fail. More bold and
adventurous “seizures of facts” must be attempted even or especially in the
face of necessary failure — because only in such reaching can even partial
hints be seized of the kind of knowledge that would be useful in the confused,
frustrating, modem world.. Beauty, in itself, is an old answer, a failure. The
Grotesque is the answer, the vision of the day. Beauty requires vision
without exertion of the intellect. The Grotesque, as itself a seeking,
necessarily uses intellect and effort, which must have been very satisfying to
Ruskin’s evangelical soul. Ultimately, then, the association of woman with
Beauty accompanied by the association of the world with the grotesque
undermines the domestic queen’s moral authority, which is an authority
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
278
based on beautifully accurate perception, and raises doubt concerning
Ruskin’s endorsement of it. For if he really meant the Queens’ Gardens to
spread across the entire isle, to enclose the “open world,” that would be
tantamount to wishing for the Grotesque to become Beautiful. And that
would be a step backward in the progress of aesthetic perception.
3 Earlier Ruskin had noted the “Dragon’s descent from Medusa and Typhon,
indicated in the serpent-clouds floating from its head” (7: 402).
4 See chapter one.
5 Another similarity to a Ruskinian conception of womanhood is the
description of her singing: “She sang Beethoven’s ‘Per Pieta non dirmi
addio,’ with a subdued but searching pathos which had that essential of
perfect singing, the making one oblivious of art or manner, and only
possessing one with the song.” She appears to sings as if she were merely the
medium or instrument of the song itself; her own “art or manner” is not
noticed. And she sings the “note wanted” for small domestic spaces: “ It was
the sort of voice that gives the impression of being meant like a bird’s
wooing for an audience near and beloved.” The privacy implied by such a
style is emphasized by Daniel’s “covering his eyes with his had, wanting to
seclude the melody in darkness” (422), foreshadowing the eventual reduction
of her audience to the family home.
6 See chapter 4.
7 This is not so big a trick of course, since his perspective and concerns are
familiar to us from Eliot’s other works and have usually been accompanied
by editorial approval.
8 See his Theory of Moral Sentiments which theorizes that we try to conform
our behavior to that of an Imaginary Spectator —which assumes, of course,
that this product of our minds is objective. Daniel’s “diffusive” sympathy
poses quite a challenge to this theory’s easy calculation of feeling.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
279
Works Cited
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. Ed. Barbara Hardy. New York: Penguin,
1967.
Hume, David. “Of the Standard of Taste.” Essays. Moral. Political, and
Literary. Ed. Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985.
226-249.
Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. London: Chatto and Windus, 1948.
Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin. Ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander
Wedderbum. 39vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ed. D.D. Raphael and A. L.
Madfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
280
Bibliography
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the
Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Bossche, Chris R. Vanden. “The Queen in the Garden/The Woman of the
Streets: The Separate Spheres and the Inscription of Gender.” Journal
of Pre-Raphaelite Studies ns 1 (1992): 1-15.
Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Penguin, 1985.
—. Daniel Deronda. Ed. Barbara Hardy. New York: Penguin, 1967.
—. Felix Holt. Ed. Peter Coveney. New York: Penguin, 1972.
—• Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. 9vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1954-78.
—. Middlemarch. Ed. Rosemary Ashton. New York: Penguin, 1994.
Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. “George Eliot’s Conception of Sympathy.”
Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40 (1985): 23-42.
Gagnier, Regenia. “A Critique of Practical Aesthetics.” Aesthetics and
Ideology. Ed. George Levine. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994.
Hume, David. “Of the Standard of Taste.” Essays, Moral, Political, and
Literary. Ed. Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985.
226-249.
Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic
Ideology in Victorian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.
Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. London: Chatto and Windus, 1948.
Levine, George. “George Eliot’s Hypothesis of Reality.” Nineteenth-
Century Fiction 35 (1980): 1-28.
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281
—. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady
Chatterlev. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Maurice
Cranston. London: Collier Books, 1965.
Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Beauty’s Bodv: Femininity and Representation in
British Aestheticism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin. Ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander
Wedderbum. 39vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ed. D.D. Raphael and A. L.
Madfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982.
Weltman, Sharon Aronofsky. Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in
Victorian Culture.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev.
ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.
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281
—. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady
Chatterlev. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Maurice
Cranston. London: Collier Books, 1965.
Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in
British Aestheticism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin. Ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander
Wedderbum. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ed. D.D. Raphael and A. L.
Madfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982.
Weltman, Sharon Aronofsky. Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in
Victorian Culture.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev.
ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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Creator Archer, Elizabeth Marie (author)

Core Title Critical beauties: Aesthetics, gender, and realism in John Ruskin and George Eliot

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag literature, English,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Kincaid, James R. (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-476168

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