CONCLUSIONES Y RECOMENDACIONES

Your letter has greatly restored the shaken confidence of my friend, who is unusually sensitive, and unlike most writers is more anxious about excellence than about appearing in print—as his waiting so long before taking the venture proved. He is consequently afraid of failure though not afraid of obscurity; and by failure he would understand that which I suspect most writers would be apt to consider as success—so high is his ambition.3

As George Eliot explains in her journal entry of December 6, 1857, she wrote her early short stories as practice for writing longer fiction. Novel writing “had always been a vague dream” which had never resolved itself into a subject.4 She sat down to try after George Henry Lewes, impressed by her success in the periodical press, encouraged her. He said, “It may be a failure—it may be that you are unable to write fiction. Or perhaps, it may be just good enough to warrant your trying again . . . You may write a chef-d’oeuvre at once—there’s no telling.”5 Eliot did try, and she met with fairly immediate success, enough to ‘warrant trying again’ in a longer form. First, she produced “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” “Mr Gilfil’s Love Story,” and “Janet’s Repentance” which were

3

“George Henry Lewes writing to John Blackwood,” Letters II.276-7.

4

Quoted in Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1985) 206.

5

Quoted in Haight 206. The Scenes have been variously praised and insulted. One of the first modern critical treatments of the three together finds them especially disappointing in contrast to Eliot’s longer work. “But today, especially as we consider the stories in relationship to the novels which were soon to follow, the Scenes are generally (but not uniformly) disappointing: sometimes sentimental, melodramatic, unbalanced, starkly simple, and marred by the particularly intrusive voice of the author.” Daniel Pierre Deneau, “Imagery in the Scenes of Clerical Life.” Victorians Newsletter 28 (1965) 18.

published together as the Scenes of Clerical Life in 1858. The collection was originally intended to include more stories, but Eliot was frustrated by Blackwood’s lukewarm response to “Janet’s Repentance.” By her own admission, these three stories were practice for longer work. I see them as explorations in theme as well as technique and trace through them a growing preoccupation with the issues of self-presentation. The questions “Who knows individuals at their deepest levels?” and “How can a person protect himself or herself from societal misunderstanding?” lie just below the surface of most of Eliot’s work. In her short fiction, she elaborates on these deeply theoretical problems. The stories are the first place where she raises these questions and starts trying to answer them. I will work through the first four of the short stories before returning to her biography and moving on into her novels. These stories already begin Eliot’s critique of what is and is not selfish. In particular, I will look at how public knowledge interacts with self-representation and how these interactions can be woven together or torn apart.

The Scenes are also the first place where the critic must begin asking himself or herself how realistic—philosophically, autobiographically, and theoretically—Eliot’s fiction is. The autobiographical links are sometimes overt, and Eliot directly addressed the mixture of historical recounting and fabrication in a letter to John Blackwood on May 28, 1858. She wrote that “Amos Barton” was “spun out of the subtlest web of minute observation and inward experience, from my first childish recollections up to recent years. So it is with all the other stories.”6 Although Eliot means the three Scenes when she writes “all,” willfully misreading her comment and proleptically extending it onto her later fiction is not

thematically inappropriate. While she resists the notion that her novels and stories enjoyed a

6

simple one to one correspondence to the real world, she never—or rarely, anyway—denies that her fiction is partly autobiographical in its sources She does, however, refuse to allow it to be worked through as a roman a clef (literally, a novel with a key).

[I]t is invariably the case that when people discover certain points of coincidence in a fiction with facts that happen to have come to their

knowledge, they believe themselves able to furnish a key to the whole. That is amusing enough to the author, who knows from what widely sundered portions of experience—from what a combination of subtle shadowy

suggestions with certain actual object and events, his story has been formed.”7 Indeed, it is specifically this compulsion to find a key that readers must resist. Keys are objects of suspicion in Eliot’s fiction everywhere we encounter them. As we learn in

Middlemarch, there is no key to all mythologies, and here there is no key to interpretation. The interpretations of selfishness as a trope are similarly tricky because there is no exact correspondence, and Eliot was not entirely consistent in her usage. While we must look at the events in her life as potential sources for her opinions on selfishness, we must avoid treating the sources as actual explanations. Instead, throughout this project, I look precisely at what Eliot wrote and attempt to understand what she said in its proper milieu: in the texts.

Addressing the Scenes raises certain unavoidable issues for Eliot scholars. The period when she was writing them (1856 and 1857) saw her creating the alias of George Eliot and moving away from her established credentials as an essayist. She hid her new life as a novelist from the Brays and the rest of her Coventry circle, thereby inviting eventual

criticism from the only people who had stood by her through her transition from her father’s house to London.8 The other major issue is inherent in the subject matter of the stories. Having taken preachers and priests as her subject, she was treating the themes which she had

7

Letters II.459

8

I address her old friends’ feelings about Mary Ann Evans hiding behind George Eliot in the next chapter when I come to the “withdrawing of the incognito.”

fourteen years before so strongly rejected. Despite the claims that she made to her father during her personal “Holy War,” it is not surprising that she decided to return to the scenes which she knew from her evangelical youth. In other words, she had to process her feelings about religion before she could get down to longer works of fiction.9 Although it may seem that religion itself is a vexed category in the Scenes, the social aspect is already the most important component to religion in the stories. Eliot never analyzes any character’s individual religious belief.10 She instead deals with the social elements of religious life by discussing the romantic entanglements and prejudices of certain clerical figures. As a result of the general topic, though, selfishness first appears as a religiously-coded sin. By the end of her career, it will be almost exclusively a secular and social sin.11 The three stories

become increasingly more strident in their call for individualism—here figured as “necessary selfishness”—and sympathy to protect Eliot’s characters from various forms of selfish misunderstanding that plague the small towns of Shepperton and Milby.

9

Gordon Haight implicitly links Eliot’s intense self-scrutiny to her sensitivity for her audience. “Her old feeling of hostility towards organized religion had evaporated since she began to write the Scenes of Clerical Life, and though her agnosticism remained, she never again spoke contemptuously of any sincerely held faith.” Haight 256. Writing the Scenes was expiatory for her.

10

Having become more comfortable with her authorial voice and having found an interested audience, she moved onto more personalized treatment of individual religious experience in Adam Bede but never with any indication of what is right or true—only what those individuals believe.

11

Brian Spittles walks a fine line in his (provocatively titled) book George Eliot: Godless Woman. He depicts Eliot as someone who “understood loss of faith” and tried to help heal “Victorian confidence” in “pain” with a “scrupulous” attention to the way belief works for individuals. Brian Spittles, George Eliot: Godless Woman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993) 72. His larger project is to recuperate Eliot’s feminist aims to her ambiguous social context.

III. The Limits of Social Knowledge in “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos