ENTREVISTA DIRIGIDA AL RECTOR LCDO VICTOR FREIRE LOPEZ DEL COLEGIO TÉCNICO “JOHN DAVISON ROCKEFELLER” DEL

Fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference . . . is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise the stereotype, which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and

identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated . . .101

The accusation of selfishness works on many levels, and its various definitions are mutually reinforcing because “selfishness” itself can never be reduced to any one of them. It comes in many forms in Eliot’s fiction: moral self-righteousness, economic greed, sexual pleasure-seeking, moral obtuseness, egotisitical self-regard, and an inability to imagine the world from any viewpoint other than one's own. I find Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the stereotype useful here. Although his subject is colonial discourse and the process of othering, his development of “productive ambivalence” is a helpful way of looking at stereotypes in general, because the “ambivalent” fluctuations of the meaning of selfishness help to “produce” the varied possibilities inherent in the accusation.102 Moral self-

righteousness and egotistical self-regard are mutually reinforcing. Sexual pleasure-seeking might be a form of moral obtuseness on one day and a disregard for others’ feelings on another. Never having to define specifically in what ways characters like Amos Barton or Mr. Tryan might really be selfish helps their oppressors keep anxiety over them at a high pitch.103 In fact, when Janet Dempster stops to consider in what ways Tryan might really be selfish (and she focuses on a supposed smug superiority), the stereotype collapses under the revealed weight of its falsehood. This collapse can only happen when the accusation goes

101

Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question,” Screen 24.6 (1983) 18.

102

Bhabha 19.

103

These situations from “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton” and “Janet’s Repentance” are explained in the next chapter.

from a general and stereotyped form to a specific and analyzable one. Eliot performs this logical strategy over and over with her characters.

Bhabha’s theory “suggests that the point of intervention should shift from the

identification of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse.”104 Throughout my dissertation, I engage both “points of intervention” to specify the positive and negative interpretations of stereotyped selfishness, as well as the power structures that these accusations encode. Bhabha argues that the stereotype needs constant reiteration to help it strive towards the fixity that it can never fully achieve. This constant repetition contains within itself an acknowledgement of doubt. If Tom Tulliver must continually tell his sister Maggie that she acts exclusively from selfish impulses, his dogmatism must contain a suspicion that what he says might not be true. He is, in effect, trying to convince himself that she is the selfish one and not he. If first Robert Evans and then his son Isaac acted in the same way towards the young George Eliot, we must recognize their draconian behavior— refusal to accept explanations or to respond at all—as ineffective coping strategies that cut off any recourse on Eliot’s part.105 The stereotyped individual is robbed of power because any attempt to argue against selfishness, for example, becomes a product of the supposed stereotypical behavior. This huis clos becomes Eliot’s fictional world.

The positive aims of selfishness that Eliot identifies are more accurately

reinterpretations or re-evaluations of self-awareness than they are of selfishness as such. However, they function at a surface level in homologous ways to selfishness. The initial

104

Bhabha 18.

105

I am thinking specifically of Robert Evans’s refusal to speak to his daughter after she announced her decision not to go to church anymore and of Isaac Evans’s silence of nearly twenty-five years while his sister lived with George Henry Lewes.

developments of this analysis carve out a set of positive traits that I call “necessary selfishness.” They include both focused self-examination and attention to the ways that social knowledge is manipulated. The first point can stand on its own for a moment, but the second point is especially tricky and needs clarification. The way that societies

misunderstand or misinterpret innocent or, at least, not guilty characters requires those characters to develop defensive strategies. A person like Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch

needs to develop some power to resist the gossip (understood here as malicious narration of his personal history) if he is going to succeed.106 Lydgate’s failure to manipulate public opinion and his inability to protect himself amounts to a lack of necessary selfishness. Eliot insists that the blistering treatment that characters like Lydgate suffer in the course of her novels is extremely unfair but also realistic to actual practice. The unfairness comes in the simultaneous false accusation of real selfishness (defined according to the array of negative qualities already identified) and the failed attempt at self-protection.

It is not startling to learn that self-awareness and self-protection are likely to be misunderstood by ungenerous viewers, but I remain attached to Eliot’s idiosyncratic characters—those most vulnerable to the criticism. As a result, I am frustrated at the misidentification of what are demonstrably selfless motives. Eliot can hardly hope to solve definitively the problem of people who selfishly misinterpret selflessness or sympathy, but she does do an excellent job of raising the problem, and she makes several steps towards finding a practical solution.107 It is a difficult subject and worth examining because even in

106

Lydgate becomes a victim of gossip’s social power to create community at the expense of a sacrificial outsider. Patricia Meyer Spacks theorizes gossip’s ability to “solidify a group’s sense of itself by heightening consciousness of ‘outside’ (inhabited by those talked about) and ‘inside’ (the temporarily secure territory of the talkers).” Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985) 5.

107

I am far from being the first person to discuss Eliot’s use of sympathy as a way past selfishness. “Critics have long noted Eliot’s concern with the theme of growth in her central characters from egoism and/or self-

its inchoate—which is not to say unarticulated—form, the experience of self-awareness happens at multiple levels. To return to the example of Middlemarch, it is clear that

Rosamond Vincy does not do the work of becoming self-aware, except in a very limited way, and Dorothea Brooke only comes by degrees to the awareness I have named. Dorothea is critical of her own motives, but she is not aware of all of their implications. She improves according to this specialized form of maturity, but she is not fully developed until late in the book.

Eliot’s novels have been endlessly studied as much for their engagement with religion, philosophy, science, the role of women, and other real-world problems as for their three-dimensional characters.108 Terry Eagleton, for example, has this to say about Eliot’s peculiarities: “Given her supple, coolly rational prose style, we are not surprised to find that she rejects absolute moral judgments of the kind that Dickens goes in for. Nobody in Eliot’s fiction is either transcendently good or wicked beyond redemption. The besetting sin of her delusion to self-knowledge and a capacity for sympathy.” Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone, The Transformation of Rage: Mourning and Creativity in George Eliot’s Fiction (New York: New York UP, 1994) 1. However, these critics have tended to miss the way that she undoes the language of selfishness itself, asserting both that society tends to mis-identify it and that some degree of it is necessary to survival.

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For Eliot’s treatment of religion, see Felicia Bonaparte’s The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot’s Poetic Imagination, Brian Spittles’s George Eliot: Godless Woman, and Joseph Wiesenfarth’s George Eliot’s Mythmaking. For Eliot’s use of philosophy and politics, see Rosemary Ashton’s The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800-1860, U.C. Knoepflmacher’s George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism, Anthony McCobb’s George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters, John Rignall’s George Eliot and Europe, and Andrew Thompson’s George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento. For Eliot and scientific thought, see Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narratives in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction and Sally Shuttleworth’s George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning. For Eliot and women, see Dorothea Barrett’s Vocation and Desire: George Eliot's Heroines, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, and William Myers’s The Teaching of George Eliot. For Eliot and other real-world issues, see Alicia Carroll’s Dark Desires: Race and Desire in George Eliot, Daniel Cottom’s Social Figures: Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation, Valentine Cunningham’s Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel, Philip Fisher’s Making Up Society: The Novels of George Eliot, Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, Susan Graver’s George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Literary Form, Bernard J. Paris’s Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values, Bernard Semmel’s George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance, and Hugh Witemeyer’s George Eliot and the Visual Arts.

characters is egoism, which is hardly the most heinous of offenses.”109 Fair enough, but this formulation of the problem is too narrow and bases Eliot’s skills too much in a comparative framework to reveal the depth of her contribution. Eagleton’s summation does not allow for the ways in which characters in Eliot’s fiction fight against either their societies’ mistaken identification of their egoism or, more interestingly, her real audience’s misreading of the same. This misreading can happen at various levels: during the reader’s initial encounter with the text, when the reader notices the split between ironic tone and deeper morals, and after the reader fails to grasp the depths of complex motives. All of these potential mistakes become apparent in the novels since they treat the aspects of selfishness so clearly in their guises as narcissism, conceitedness, greediness, vanity, and so on. Eagleton gets to the heart of what I am arguing here when he continues, “Besides, egoism is a fault which can be repaired. What can repair it is the imagination, which allows us to rise above our own interests and feel our way sympathetically into the lives of others. And the supreme form of this imaginative sympathy is known as the novel.”110 Eagleton eventually comes to

contradict Eliot’s belief that “to know all is to forgive all.”111 He calls this a “typically liberal mistake,” but Eliot is neither fully liberal nor fully convinced that her work will be a success.112 She is not sure it is possible to educate an unsympathetic crowd, but I intend to show the ways she tried anyway. Ultimately, this project is an attempt to trace the

109

Eagleton, The English Novel 163.

110

Eagleton, The English Novel 163.

111

Although he does not cite her specifically, Eagleton is alluding to Eliot’s affection for the French maxim “tout comprendre est tout pardonner” (“to know all is to forgive all”) in reference to “The Lifted Veil” (Letters IX.220). I will address this maxim in detail in the next chapter.

112

Eagleton, The English Novel 165. It must be noted that Eagleton uses contestable terms. To be “liberal” in the twenty-first century is not at all the same thing as it was in nineteenth-century England, and George Eliot had many conservative tendencies by either century’s definition. Raymond Williams’s Keywords unpacks some of this confusing history.

development of “imaginative sympathy” as a solution to the trap of egoism through Eliot’s fiction.

Although readers typically begin with Eliot’s novels, she deals with egoism and sympathy in her short fiction and tries out a few initial phrasings of the questions that will occupy her for the rest of her career. The next two chapters address the problems of an oversimplified identification of selfishness in the light of Eliot’s somewhat hidden but locatable theory of necessary selfishness. Attention to her four major short stories will allow me to articulate clearly the problems that will occupy me during the following two chapters on Eliot’s life and novels.113 My second chapter addresses her first three stories, published collectively as Scenes of Clerical Life. In the third chapter, I continue working through Eliot’s short fiction by looking at “The Lifted Veil” as a precursor to The Mill on the Floss— her most autobiographical novel—before addressing her difficulties when she was exposed to public criticism and the way that The Mill on the Floss answered both artistic and personal demands. My fourth chapter takes up the problems of the early fiction in her final novel,

Daniel Deronda and shows that she had become aware of the limits of sympathy as a resolution to these problems. In the fifth and final chapter, I address the technical apparatus for describing and defending selves in conflict by looking to its influence on later authors. Taken collectively, these readings attempt to track, through Eliot’s work, the shifting meaning of a term that has haunted the formation of modern subjectivity.

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George Eliot also produced two other short stories. “Edward Neville” is an incomplete piece of juvenilia in a school notebook and was probably composed in 1834. It is included in the appendix of the Gordon Haight biography. “Brother Jacob” is Eliot’s fifth complete short story, published in July of 1864 in The Cornhill Magazine. This last story is concerned almost exclusively with selfishness as it relates to avarice. While the emphasis on selfishness’s similarity to or reduction into simple greed is a phenomenon that I will explain as an especially modern formulation, the story itself is rather limited and caricatural compared to Eliot’s other work. Since its first publication as a piece in the Cornhill, it has usually been published as a pair with “The Lifted Veil” although the tones of the two are strikingly different.

Chapter Two: Troubling the “Exquisite Self”: Undoing Selfishness in Scenes of Clerical Life

I. Introduction

I am unable to alter anything in relation to the delineation or development of character, as my stories always grow out of my psychological conception of the dramatis personae . . . My artistic bent is not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy. And I cannot stir a step aside from what I feel to be true in character.1

[W]e have all our secret sins; and if we knew ourselves, we should not judge each other harshly. (186)2

George Eliot’s fiction questions naïve assumptions about selfishness. Too many other people had collapsed it into a simple, baggy discursive category that encompassed multiple negative accusations. This concatenation linked greedy, conceited, vain, solipsistic, and egotistical motives under the same, productively vague, accusation. The present study of Eliot’s work seeks to reveal that her conception of selfishness is considerably more

problematic and interesting than the received notion and that it develops over time. Eliot begins, in her short fiction, to study the various claims of selfishness, not by simply eliding them as most people had done, but by taking them in turn. She goes on to reveal that the negative discourse of selfishness sometimes obscures positive, related concepts. She examines the ways in which these better possibilities get misunderstood and too easily

1

George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1954-78) II.299. George Eliot was writing to John Blackwood to reject his suggested changes to “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story.”

2

This reference, and all future parenthetical citations in this chapter, refer to George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. Jennifer Gribble (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998). This passage is found in “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story,” which will be discussed as the second story.

collapsed back into the simple qualifier “selfish.” Eliot’s work does not go so far as to fully reclaim all of selfishness’s positive and negative qualities in a stubbornly optimistic

reevaluation—as Wilde and some of the Decadents later in the century might be said to attempt. But Eliot actively works to re-situate selfishness’s constitutive elements. Her goals are not themselves entirely disinterested because she was also suffering from the same accusations that she was trying to redefine.

Eliot’s first short story “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” introduces the general ground I want to address. It specifically names an accusation of selfishness and then sets it in relation to a generally occurring problem of social knowledge. The failed manipulation of this knowledge and the ways in which the manipulation is trumped by sympathetic identification create a precedent for Eliot’s later work. The second piece, “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story,” contrasts an unselfish and self-aware man with two other people who fail in important ways. One of these foils is a narcissistic, unaware cad, and the other is a selfless woman who fails to protect herself. All three are watched by a selfish, unaware man who, intriguingly enough, is still a good person. The third story, “Janet’s Repentance,” combines some of the insights of the first two stories to emphasize that social knowledge of individual worth needs constant evaluation. The story also takes up the thread of selflessness from “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story” and explains that selflessness is not wholly good. It too must be modulated, or it becomes an unhealthy self-abnegation. Eliot’s fourth story, “The Lifted Veil” allows a transition into Eliot’s longer fiction because it makes radical claims about what it means to narrate individual experience. More than any other piece by Eliot, “The Lifted Veil” is tied to its narrator, but it is also paradoxically the most obsessed with the