George Eliot's Reflexive Text: Three Tonalities in the Narrative Voice of Middlemarch

Author(s): John L. Tucker

Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Autumn, 1991, Vol. 31, No. 4,
Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 1991), pp. 773-791
Published by: Rice University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/450828

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 SEL 31 (1991)
ISSN 0039-3657

George Eliot's Reflexive Text:

Three Tonalities in the Narrative
Voice of Middlemarch

JOHN L. TUCKER

The reflexiveness of George Eliot's fiction has become one of

its chief attractions: modern criticism likes a self-conscious text, a
novel that investigates its own authority. No one is scandalized any
more by what used to be called George Eliot's "intrusions"; in fact,
epigraphs, footnotes, and narrative asides are now thought of as
central to her practice rather than as peripheral mannerisms.1
This revision belongs to a larger movement that is deepening (and
complicating) our understanding of nineteenth-century realism.
Within this movement, however, there has been sometimes a
misleading tendency to describe complexity as if it were
incoherence. To take an extreme, but much-cited example, the
pier-glass passage in Middlemarch-how the scratches on a mirror
seem to form concentric circles around any source of reflected
light-has been interpreted as a sign that the book itself is
fundamentally "unreadable."2 Variants of this idea are now
common in political and in psychological criticism; Middlemarch is
said to be a novel at war with itself, a text that either
misunderstands or disguises its true, "subversive" message.3
their emphasis on textuality, these readings are less inter
the text than in something supposed to be behind it. They r
sometimes brilliantly, modern insights about the hidden

John L. Tucker is Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College

in Garden City, New York, and specializes in nineteenth-century studies. He i
working on a study of treatments of Savonarola in nineteenth-century literature

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774 MIDDLEMARCH' S NARRATIVE VOICE

interconnectedness of language, perception, and privilege, but

they do so at the risk of obscuring the nature of pre-modern
literature.4 A characteristic weakness of these readings is a kind of
tone-deafness; speaking the modern languages of power and pain,
they may not be able to hear that complex tone which is one of
the triumphs of Middlemarch and finally, perhaps, its subject: tone
is the novel's civilized response to what the narrator calls, in a
memorable phrase, "the difficulties of civilization."
Awareness of those difficulties makes the novel's tone varied
and complex. The religion of humanity turns into satire, punctua
ed with moments of terror; the narrator looks on amused while
the heroine struggles for her life. More confusingly for modern
theory, Middlemarch laughs at its own epistemological difficulties
even while it takes them seriously. This seeming contradiction
arises in part from peculiar relations between author and narra-
tor. The shadowy presence of "George Eliot" makes itself felt
throughout the novel, but to the extent that it is incarnated in the
narrator, that presence suffers limitation and partiality.5 The re-
sult is not disorientation or anomie; the footing is tricky, but the
novel finds a balance in self-awareness. We could simplify the
novel's mixed tone by calling it ironic wit, and certainly it is a
funnier book than modern criticism tends to notice. But George
Eliot's narrative devices introduce other frames of mind, too:
detachment, a Wordsworthian sense of loss, and fear. None of
these outlooks dominates the novel. Each has its characteristic
successes and failures, articulated by the overlap and competition
of several kinds of discourse, notably comedy, history, and sci-
ence, which Middlemarch wryly understands as its precursors and
rivals; their complex relations with George Eliot's fiction are part
of the novel's subject.
We can begin by noticing that comedy in Middlemarch usually
appears in conjunction with other modes. A lot of jokes get told
under the cover of scientific talk, for instance; in George Eliot's
narrator, the scientist is never very far from the satirist, perhaps
because both tend to distance themselves from their targets. But
the comic-objective tone does not represent the whole mind of the
novel, which is managed in such a way that the narrator's amuse-
ment sometimes seems an inadequate response to Dorothea
Brooke's "life of mistakes." Chapter 2, for example, contains the
masterpiece of urbanity already quoted above: while describing
Dorothea's romantic misperception of Casaubon, the narrator
comments, "Dorothea's inferences may seem large; but really life

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 JOHN L. TUCKER 775

could never have gone on at any period but for this liberal allow-
ance of conclusions, which has facilitated marriage under the
difficulties of civilization" (22).6 This pokes fun at Dorothea, but
even more at the dismayed reader, who naturally wishes Dorothea
to see Casaubon as he really is. The narrator will have no such
interference: start that sort of thing, and nobody would ever get
married-you could finish off the race with your altruism. This is
the joke of someone with a classical turn of mind, who admires
restraint of passion, and all that it enables. His satires display,
without radically challenging, the price of social arrangements.
The narrator is a character here, individuated, like all George
Eliot characters, by a way of talking. Listen to his sophisticated
drawl: "Dorothea's inferences may seem large; but really . . ." The
word "large" ironically diminishes Dorothea's error; "but really"
asks us not to anguish over necessary misadventures. In his homi-
lies and asides, the narrator often takes this detached tone; his
good humor requires it. But at this point in the novel, few readers
find themselves so detached; most are apt to agree with Chettam
and Will Ladislaw, who describe Dorothea's marriage as "horri-
ble." Moreover, the narrator's urbane humor seems at odds with
his own vision of Dorothea as a kind of latter-day Saint Theresa. In
the "Prelude" he leads us to think of Dorothea as a swan "raised
uneasily among the ducklings," doomed by the conventions of
modern English life to be "foundress of nothing," but a potential
genius nevertheless. After that introduction, the narrator can nev-
er fully revoke Dorothea's status as the Heroine, uniquely en-
dowed, capable of great deeds. And so we may laugh when she
embraces her fate in the person of Casaubon, but at the same time
we know that she is courting death, and we don't want to follow
her. In that reaction we resist the narrator's comic view, and begin
to take part in the novel's tension of competing tones.
Sometimes the narrator's own voice betrays that tension, as, for
example, whenever he issues one of his mock-apologies for having
described "low" people or "common" situations. In these passages
the narrator always lets his audience know that he suspects them
of hankering after romance and epic, of wishing to escape the
salutary contemplation of their own recent history. He points out
that readers disturbed by vulgar lives are at liberty to imagine
them in more exalted dress. Apologies of this sort are a well worn
convention of the novel, which since its beginnings has often
sounded defensive about its modern, comic, realistic bias. To this
tradition Middlemarch adds the Romantic principle that man is

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776 MIDDLEMARCH' S NARRATIVE VOICE

more completely understood when looked

in exceptional circumstances; George Eliot shares the Romantic
conviction that only by representing common human nature can
literature become a positive moral force, speaking for brother-
hood instead of serving as an ornament for the elite. Yet when her
narrator suggests an attitude along these lines he also implies that
in achieving this new world much of value will be lost from the
old. He makes, one feels, an unwilling democrat. He stands at the
watershed, looking both ways, and his voice always carries regret.
Sometimes he even seems to feel that comedy is a penance borne
by a middle-class world incapable of grandeur. This is the attitude
of the well-known passage in The Mill on the Floss, Book 4, chapter
1, where a memory of the castled Rhine recalls a vanished era of
"living religious art and religious enthusiasm . . . the grand histor-
ic life of humanity."7 A similar nostalgia, a wish to reconstitute a
kind of epic in "our own vulgar era" is at work in Middlemarch,
although it runs counter to the narrator's acceptance of "the
difficulties of civilization," and is frequently subjected to various
deflating ironies. At the end of the novel, in the "Finale," we find
the narrator speaking as though bourgeois life could still be
thought of as a kind of epic:

Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives,

is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept
their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among
the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the begin-
ning of the home epic-the gradual conquest or irremediable
loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years
a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.
(818)

Traditionally, of course, marriage is a comic theme, the final

resolution of disorder. The narrator's intent is to begin where
novels usually end-to show what really follows marriage. Thus
George Eliot signals her impatience not only with the social inac-
curacies of novels, but also with the comic mode itself. She may be
said to be inaugurating a new mode-neither epic, because social
conditions have changed; nor tragic, because she aims to repre-
sent common life; nor comic, because she offers no resolution,
nor does she fully share the comic view. The tension of these
constituent parts of her enterprise tends to pull the novel's tone in
contrary directions.
Another conflict of mode in Middlemarch arises from the novel's
claim to being a kind of history. The complex ironies of this

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 JOHN L. TUCKER 777

theme account for some of the density of the novel's celebrated

final paragraph, which sums up Dorothea's later life:

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 grow-
ing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts;
and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might
have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a
hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
(825)

The reference to Cyrus reminds us of Herodotus, whose history is

also alluded to in chapter 11. Both references suggest that West-
ern history has focused on the lives of men, ignoring or slighting
women. Herodotus wrote of a monarch, a breaker of rivers; George
Eliot, on the other hand, has recounted the "unhistoric acts" of a
woman whose life was diverted, if not broken. In each case, the
protagonist influences and represents the text. In the case of
Herodotus, the result is called history, and even if its veracity is
now doubted, still it is something known, established. In the case
of George Eliot, the result is called a novel, something equivocal
and problematic, whose function in the world is as self-contradic-
tory as the life of its heroine. On the one hand, we are offered
namelessness, invisibility, dammed-up rivers diverted and broken
by male power, anonymous death.8 On the other hand, Dorothea's
spirit is said to have been so "finely-touched" that it bore "fine
issues," a progeny dispersed like a rare gas to blend with and
invigorate every molecule of air. Fecundity and death: every phrase
in this passage pulls both ways. Does "diffusive" mean that Dor-
othea's life permeated the universe, or merely that it had that
potential? If hidden lives diffuse "incalculably," how can their
effect be evaluated? The difficulty is compounded by the possibil-
ity, suggested by several critics, that Dorothea's "fine issues" are
the pages of Middlemarch, invisible in her world, but disseminated
everywhere in ours.9 This suggestion opens two complementary
senses in which Dorothea's life is "unhistoric." Convention hin-
ders women from doing famous deeds; Dorothea can only be the
heroine of a fictional history. Since lives lived in novels are always
"hidden" to a degree, and the tombs where they end cannot be
visited, how can they contribute to the good of the world?

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778 MIDDLEMARCH' S NARRATIVE VOICE

George Eliot tackles the problem by sugge

have more in common with history than is generally supposed.'0
This theme begins at the point where the novel first turns away
from Dorothea's story. Chapters 1-10 focus on the landed gentry
of Dorothea's circle; then the Middlemarchers come bustling in,
and we are invited to see them as examples of an historical pro-
cess:

Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movem

had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young pr
sional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a dr
and six children for their establishment, but also those less
marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the bound-
aries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness
of interdependence.
(93)

Today's tragedies are deflated in the series, "brilliant young

professional dandies": in bourgeois life there is no tragedy, only
ridiculous economic disgrace. Writers are not poets anymore, but
natural historians, scientists interested in "less marked vicissitudes."
Their appropriate mode is a kind of comic history, which the
narrator insists, tongue in cheek, is no upstart genre:

In fact, much the same sort of movement and mixture went

on in old England as we find in older Herodotus, who also, in
telling what had been, thought it well to take a woman's lot
for his starting-point; though Io, as a maiden apparently be-
guiled by attractive merchandise, was the reverse of Miss
Brooke, and in this respect perhaps bore more resemblance
to Rosamond Vincy, who had excellent taste in costume, with
that nymph-like figure and pure blondness which give the
largest range to choice in the flow and colour of drapery.
(94)

The outrageously easy transition from Herodotus to drapery mocks

the decadence of modern life, which, though it has lost the past,
has still no other frame of reference. The modern idiom cheapens
Jo, "beguiled by attractive merchandise," and yet the narrator
needs her, and the writer who celebrated her, to lend the novel
some authenticity. The wit and irony of the passage do not deny
that need-they demonstrate its complexity.
If history has roots in myth, may not fiction call itself history?
George Eliot went on to develop this idea in Daniel Deronda,

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 JOHN L. TUCKER 779

where all origins are seen as fictional, and art,

al identity equally require "the make-believe
can be a liberating concept, but Middlemarch,
more than Daniel Deronda does, keeps apologizing for not having
the scope of its literary ancestors. Herodotus wove the whole
fabric of Greek history from a single thread. Even a writer as
recent as Henry Fielding could take in more of the world than
modern life has time to contemplate:

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had

the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago,
and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs
our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his
copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of
his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the succes-
sive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-
chair to the proscenium, and chat with us in all the lusty ease
of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were
longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs),
when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked
slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not
linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that
our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a
camp-stool in a parrot-house. I at least have so much to do in
unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were
woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must
be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed
over the tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
(138-39)

This is of course a Ciceronic disclaimer-while deprecating his

talent for digression, the narrator has actually demonstrated it. He
has also managed to appropriate Fielding's title of historian while
distracting us with elaborate modesties about antecedent colossi.
But though Fielding has given novelists the right to call their work
history, this novel is "belated" history." It must, says the narrator,
keep up with the tempo of modern life, too hasty for leisurely
digression. In consequence, Middlemarch will seem less personal
than Tom Jones, where in fact Fielding speaks of his digressions as
"a kind of mark or stamp, which may hereafter enable a very
indifferent reader to distinguish what is true and genuine in this
historic kind of writing, from what is false and counterfeit."'2
Fielding claims to have originated "this historic kind of writing"-

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780 MIDDLEMARCH' S NARRATIVE VOICE

"historic" meaning both "like history" and

his sense of doing a new thing is partly wh
the enterprise. He speaks of originating as "true and genuine,"
like making accurate history. Thus in one move Fielding posits the
idea that originality is truth, and his fiction true history. Mid-
dlemarch, its narrator implies, is no less true, but more anony-
mous. The coinage has been devalued, like so much else in mod-
ern life, and a true history must go forth without so much of the
author's personality visible upon it.
For George Eliot, history in this age means evolution, slow and
subtle, both in society at large and in the growth of individual
character. Tracking these developments the narrator of Mid-
dlemarch sees himself as a kind of natural historian, but the au-
thor's attitude towards this scientific stance is more complicated
than some modern critics have suggested.'13 In the first place,
science does not rule the novel unopposed-it simply represents
one of the competing movements in the novel's narrative style.
George Eliot does seem to have hoped sometimes that the truths
discoverable to fiction would turn out to be laws as elegant and
lucid as those governing the physical universe. But several impor-
tant episodes in Middlernarch tend to balance this enthusiasm for
the scientific point of view with a sense that science has its own
special liabilities.
"Who that cares much to know the history of man," the narra-
tor asks in the first line of the novel, "and how that mysterious
mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not
dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa?" Thus the novel
itself is offered us as a kind of experiment, in which we are invited
to see "how that mysterious mixture behaves." By implication, the
narrator is outside the world of the experiment, a dispassionate
observer. Similar language occurs in the opening lines of chapter
40: "In watching effects, if only of an electric battery, it is often
necessary to change our place and examine a particular mixture
or group at some distance from the point where the movement we
are interested in was set up" (389). As we have already observed,
the narrator sometimes uses his scientific detachment for satiric
purposes. A good many critics have discussed this clinical distance
in Middlemarch, but its alienating effect on the clinical observer
has not been adequately recognized.14 In chapter 3, for example,
the narrator comments anthropologically on women's hairstyles
of the period: "public feeling required the meagerness of nature
to be dissimulated by tall barricades of frizzed curls and bows,

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 JOHN L. TUCKER 781

never surpassed by any great race except t

double satire says that fashion is no index of c
English provincials might as well have been savages anyway in
those days. But the joke boomerangs on the narrator, isolating
him in his superiority. Hoping, perhaps, to avoid that kind of
isolation, the narrator sometimes makes fun of his own scientific
postures, but in his laughter one can hear notes of menace and
despair. In chapter 6, for instance, after watching Mrs. Cadwallad-
er on her social rounds, the narrator boasts of his ability to per-
ceive hidden causes of behavior:

Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find

ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather
coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may see a creature
exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller crea-
tures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-
pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets
which make vortices for these victims while the swallower
waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way, met
phorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwalla
er's match-making will show a play of minute causes produ
ing what may be called thought and speech vortices to br
her the sort of food she needed.
(58-59)

A "strong lens" may take us beyond "coarse" interpretations of

behavior. But at that level of magnification, the universe has shrunk
to a water-drop, and humanity has become an affair of hairlets
and vortices, where all that matters is food. This is not objective
science, but Swiftian satire, and as in Swift, the satire is double-
edged. We may need to see the animal in man, but we lose some
of our own humanity in the process.15
We have looked at passages where the narrator's scientific lan-
guage has ironic overtones. In the "Prelude," however, an opening
itself unstable in tone, the narrator seems ambivalent about sci-
ence: he both adopts and disavows a scientific approach to his
material. Referring to the modern Theresas, doomed to "a life of
mistakes," he says:

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the
inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power
has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level
of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count

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782 MI DDLEMARCH' S NARRATIVE VOICE

three and no more, the social lot of wom

with scientific certitude.
(5)

What gets laughed at here is partly the desire for "scientific certi-
tude," which the narrator associates with narrow prejudice, an
association the novel goes on to study in the character of Lydgate.
It would also seem that the narrator hereby disclaims any preten-
sions of his own to scientific truth in his study of "the social lot of
women."
What sort of enterprise is he engaged in, then? We have been
invited to think of the novel as an experiment, to imagine the
book as a kind of terrarium, a miniature ecosystem where all the
flora and fauna of English provincial life are allowed to flourish.
Into this little world a creature from another time and place is
released, a modern Saint Theresa.16 What will happen to her? The
"Prelude" ends with this prediction:

Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the duck-

lings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in
fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is
born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving
heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble
off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering
in some long-recognizable deed.
(5)

Hardly the usual introduction to a novel-a promise of anticlimaxes

and missed opportunity. Nor would this seem to be the most
effective invitation to the witnessing of an experiment: if we al-
ready know the results, why go on? "Experiment," therefore, is
only a partial way of describing what the novel is up to. More
precisely, the experimental impulse is visibly in conflict here with
another, older set of values.
In connection with this theme a curious parallel arises between
the narrator and Lydgate, who is not only a scientist but also an
investigator of human nature. Sometimes his studies sound like a
version of the novel's own project:'7

Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the

strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap
narration. . . . He for his part had tossed away all cheap
inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease: he

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 JOHN L. TUCKER 783

was enamoured of that arduous invention

eye of research ... he wanted to pierce the
minute processes which prepare human m
that delicate poise and transition which de
of happy or unhappy consciousness.
(161-62)

Ironically, Lydgate cannot observe his own "delicate poise and

transition." George Eliot can-she makes a detailed anatomy of
Lydgate's moral decay, and one of the agents of that decay as she
describes it is precisely that coldness of clinical perspective into
which the narrator himself seems to fall at times. Perhaps the
point is that all experiments have in them an element of cruelty.
This theme emerges in chapter 15, where the narrator summarizes
Lydgate's history before coming to Middlemarch. The young doc-
tor had been studying in Paris, where among other things he
conducted "some galvanic experiments":

One evening, tired with his experimenting, and not being

able to elicit the facts he needed, he left his frogs and rabbits
to some repose under their trying and mysterious dispensa-
tion of unexplained shocks, and went on to finish his evening
at the theatre of the Porte Saint Martin, where there was a
melodrama which he had already seen several times; attract-
ed, not by the ingenious work of the collaborating authors,
but by an actress whose part it was to stab her lover, mistak-
ing him for the evil-designing duke of the piece.
(148)

Lydgate's experiments parody Providence, also a "trying and mys-

terious dispensation of unexplained shocks." The narrator's dic-
tion is ghoulishly fastidious ("some repose"), suggesting despite
the humorous tone a monstrous lack of feeling on Lydgate's part.
From his demonic laboratory the sentence magics him to the
theater; he goes there "to finish his evening," as though the melo-
drama and his experiments were two acts in the same grand
guignol, as though they satisfied the same impulse. Moreover, the
passage invites one to suspect that Lydgate himself is a kind of
experimental animal "attracted" by a cruel and deceptive bait that
will transform him from master to slave. In that case, who can be
the cruel experimenter but George Eliot?
An interesting feature of this little history is the ease with which
Lydgate's scientific inquiries blend into his erotic delusion, as

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784 MIDDLEMARCH' S NARRATIVE VOICE

though the one prepared the way for the

science is no guarantee against egoism, or does George Eliot
suggest a moral flaw in the scientific outlook itself? An oddly
macabre passage in chapter 36 may shed some light on this ques-
tion. At this point Lydgate and Rosamond are engaged, and spin-
ning the "gossamer web" of "young love-making." The narrator is
amused at Lydgate's susceptibility, "in spite," as he says, "of expe-
rience supposed to be finished off with the drama of Laure." He
continues:

In spite too, of medicine and biology; for the inspection of

macerated muscle or of eyes presented in a dish (like Santa
Lucia's), and other incidents of scientific inquiry, are ob-
served to be less incompatible with poetic love than a native
dulness or a lively addiction to the lowest prose.
(337)

Saint Lucy, it will be remembered, tore out her eyes rather than
submit to a pagan lover who had admired them; she is often
depicted holding a plate with her eyes on it. There is no evidence,
however, that Lydgate is familiar with Christian iconography, nor
would a believer associate Saint Lucy's sacrifice with a Petri dish.
That grotesque association only occurs to the narrator. At one
level, of course, the narrator is only insisting that a sensitive man
should have no trouble keeping his feelings and his intellect in
separate compartments. But the violent juxtaposition of images
from the legend of Saint Lucy creates another possible reading-
that Lydgate's love is as brutal as his science. Lucia's eyes demand
a more emotional response than "inspection," and in that light
objectivity becomes pathological. Since, as I have pointed out
above, the narrator sometimes adopts a similarly clinical view of
his subjects, one is led to speculate on the possibly pathological
impulse directing his interest, and by extension, George Eliot's as
well, for like the scientist, the novelist can be accused of playing
God.18
In this connection it is important to note that George Eliot
frequently treats the theme of science in language full of theolog-
ical echoes. To be sure, it is a secularizing consciousness that hears
these echoes. For the narrator, the only God is Time, the cosmic
scientist whose interest in man, if any, is a clinical one. In the
narrator's universe, Providence has been replaced by the great
Experiment, which may not even have an object. But this secular-
ized world view is as dogmatic as any religion; witness the polem-

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 JOHN L. T U C K E R 785

ical tone of the novel's opening line: "Who that cares much to
know the history of man, and how that mysterious mixture be-
haves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at
least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa?" This practically amounts
to a test of the reader's faith: one who has not dwelt "at least
briefly" on the life of Theresa is no student of humanity; one w
has is, ipso facto, a communicant, sharing the narrator's view
acknowledging, that is, the Experimenter's unconcern, and tak
consolation only in the fact that humans have sometimes achieve
greatness.
This valuing of human achievements implies a protest against
the indifference of the Experimenter. But in the world of the
novel, George Eliot herself, as she insists on pointing out, is the
Experimenter-not indifferent, surely, but still the source of that
"trying and mysterious dispensation of unexplained shocks" which
we call, significantly, the novel's plot. The image keeps recurring
of the little world in relation to which outside observers have
divine or semi-divine status. A striking example occurs at the
beginning of chapter 41. Here the narrator introduces an elaborate
apology for a certain piece of plot machinery, Bulstrode's letter,
which Raffles will casually pick up unburnt from Joshua Rigg's
fender and use to wedge his pocket-flask, where it will remain,
hidden and mute, until "chance" will bring it to light at the
appropriate moment. Now George Eliot might well feel some
embarrassment at having stooped to such a hoary old stage-device as
this; here is how the narrator justifies it:

Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? If it happens

to have been cut in stone ... it may end by letting us into the
secret of usurpations and other scandals gossiped about long
empires ago:-this world being apparently a huge whispering-
gallery. Such conditions are often minutely represented in
our petty lifetimes. As the stone which has been kicked by
generations of clowns may come by curious little links of
effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labours it
may at last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a
bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent
wrapping or stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one
pair of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into the
opening of a catastrophe. To Uriel watching the progress of
planetary history from the Sun, the one result would be just
as much of a coincidence as the other.

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786 MIDDLEMARCH' S NARRATIVE VOICE

Having made this rather lofty comparison, I am less un-

easy in calling attention to the existence of low people by
whose interference, however little we may like it, the course
of the world is very much determined. It would be well,
certainly, if we could help to reduce their number, and some-
thing might be done by not lightly giving occasion to their
existence.
(402)

This passage contains some by-now familiar elements: deprecation

of "petty" modern life, nostalgia for the aristocratic values of epic
and tragedy, and ironic deflation of that lost world as seen by
modern science, reading the secrets of the past only to find
"scandals gossiped about long empires ago." The whispering-
gallery, aimless and cold, mixing the trivial with the lasting,
qualifies the optimistic idea of recovery. One also recognizes in
the word "catastrophe" the narrator's idea that history and drama
overlap, that the real and the imagined are intermingled. But the
narrator adds a new and chilling note in the last remarks about
reducing the number of "low people." We have noticed other
apologies for obtruding "low" figures on the reader's attention,
passages that laugh at one of the reasons why people read novels-
the bourgeois hunger for a peep at the aristocracy. This time,
however, the irony is darker; for a moment, the narrator seems to
toy with the idea of eugenics: "something might be done by not
lightly giving occasion to their existence." Of course, the reference
is to low figures in novels, not in life.'9 At the level of plot, this is
a slap at Peter Featherstone, whose bastard son, Joshua Rigg,
inherits Featherstone's estate only to sell it. But Rigg, though
denominated a "superfluity" by the Middlemarchers, functions in
the plot as one of those "curious little links of effect" which bring
about a catastrophe, as the chapter goes on to tell. Thus, while
Featherstone may have lightly given "occasion" to Rigg's existence,
George Eliot has not; she needs him and she is prepared to defend
her procedure. At first reading, her comparison of the discovered
letter to an archaeological find looks like a confession: she is
publicly, theatrically embarrassed by her machinations.20 But her
embarrassment is a pose intended to be seen through: behind it
lies a warning, almost a threat. Should the reader complain too
much at the fortuitous intervention of chance, he may tempt the
novelist to a more sinister intervention, which would violate "the
course of the world." The world of epic is gone; what we have is
the whispering gallery, a good image for the novel itself. And

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 JOHN L. TUCKER 787

though the novelist had better not be too promiscuous in

generating minor figures to carry out the plot, she cannot rule out
the "chance" interference of "low people." The business of playing
God has enough complications already.
Modern criticism is so familiar with this kind of ironic self-
consciousness in art that we sometimes underestimate the
moral dilemma that it represented in George Eliot's time. The
Victorian audience was deeply attracted to the spectacle of a min-
iature world governed by a visible Creator. Fiction was, in U.C.
Knoepflmacher's words, a joint enterprise undertaken by writer
and audience "to devise alternate models of reality in which . . .
anxieties could be scrutinized and, ideally, be allayed, arrested, or
countered."21 Much of the contemporary criticism recognizes that
attraction, more or less explicitly. In January 1873, for example,
the Edinburgh Review remarked that "George Eliot and George
Sand are inspired with a generous pity for their own creations,
and whilst they punish are content to do their best to pardon."22
Especially striking is one reviewer's biblical anguish over the end-
ing of The Mill on the Floss:

It is not right to carry on through these three marvellous

volumes, and leave us at the last standing by the grave of the
brother and sister, ready to lift up an accusatory cry, less to a
beneficent deity than to the humanly-invented Arimanes of
the universe,-"Why should such things be? Why has Thou
made us thus?"23

Passages like this one suggest that one of the powers of fiction
for Victorian readers was the opportunity of seeing through the
eyes of the demiurge, or of holding him in colloquy.
Such an experience, on the other hand, was also potentially
sacrilegious; to immerse oneself in a substitute world might be a
dereliction of Christian duty. Carlyle, J.S. Mill, and Arnold wor-
ried about this possibility, and their fear is also testimony, albeit
on the negative side, to the Victorian belief in the power of
fiction.24 It was the mishandling of that power that concerned
some Victorian readers. As one critic put it,

Fiction has . . . the great defect that it encourages both the

writer and the reader to treat the most solemn problems of
human life as things that are to be started, discussed, and laid
aside at pleasure. The conduct of the story always affords an

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788 MIDDLEMARCH' S NARRATIVE VOICE

opening to escape from the responsibility

It does even more than afford an openin
to escape from reflection into the study
subjects started are, therefore, always to
ner in which they are handled.25

George Eliot's fictions recognize and address this problem

through self-consciousness; they take visible responsibility for cre-
ating their alternate worlds. They are not only defending them-
selves: these fictions seek to establish community with the reader
on the grounds that his own consciousness is creative, not merely
mimetic; that his imagination is, in other words, as fictive as the
novel's. This perception should not be confused with modern
death-of-God philosophies. George Eliot's novels do not believe in
ultimate unintelligibility; they are aware of what some modern
critics call the scandal of language, but they do not think of it as a
scandal. George Eliot's novels are, as George Levine has said,
constructive enterprises.26 They require that we become aware of
the transformative power of words, so that we can take responsi-
bility for our own fictions.

NOTES

'Cf. Michal Peled Ginsburg, "Pseudonym, Epigraphs, and Narrative Voice:

Middlemarch and the Problem of Authorship," ELH47, 3 (Fall 1980): 542-58;
pace Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1975), p. 220, a surprisingly late description of
Middlemarch as the kind of "traditional realistic novel" which criticism can only
approach in "the indicative mode," unlike self-conscious novels, which "lend
themselves to analytic criticism." Some important earlier revisionists: Quentin
Anderson, "George Eliot in Middlemarch," in Boris Ford, ed., The Pelican Guide
to English Literature, 7 vols., From Dickens to Hardy (London and New York:
Penguin Books, 1958, rev. edn., 1966), pp. 274-93; David B. Carroll, "Unity
Through Analogy: An Interpretation of Middlemarch," VS 2, 4 (June 1959):
305-16, 305; Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959, 1963), pp. 155-66; W.J. Harvey, The Art of
George Eliot (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), especially chaps. 1 and 3.
2J. Hillis Miller reaches this conclusion from observing how the novel dis-
plays "the irreducible figurative or metaphorical nature of all language":
Miller, "Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch," from The Worlds of Victorian
Fiction, ed. Jerome H. Buckley (Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), rpt. in Harold
Bloom, ed., George Eliot (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 109-110.

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 JOHN L. TUCKER 789

3E.g. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Ma

Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
London: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 69, 525-26;Joh
Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, an
Univ. of California Press, 1987), p. 116.
4Cf. Penny Boumelha, "George Eliot and the End
ed., Women Reading Women's Writing (New York
pp. 15-35, esp. 19-26. Boumelha warns against anac
author-based" thinking in some feminist studies o
critique can be applied to any criticism that is not aw
priation of the work . . . rather than a revelation o
intention of the author."
5Cf. Dorothea Barrett, Vocation and Desire: George Eliot's Heroines (New York
and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 28-30. Noting that the gender of George
Eliot's narrators "is open to endless debate," Barrett thinks Gilbert and Gubar
"have most nearly resolved the problem when they claim: 'Doing in a woman's
way a traditionally male task of knowing, combining "a man's mind and a
woman's heart," Eliot makes such gender-based categories irrelevant. . . this
narrator becomes an authentic "we"' (Gilbert and Gubar, p. 523)." Never-
theless, Barrett opts for the female pronoun, partly, she says, "in opposition
to the critics who avoid it, one suspects, because they consider George Eliot's
narrators too rational to be female." But what if the book were satirizing that
"rationality"? Or, more precisely, that apparent rationality, for I agree that
what's interesting about the narrator is his/her lack of control over the book.
What I hear, however, below "the apparently smooth surface" of the narra-
tive, is not Barrett's "anxious rushing back and forth between extremes," but
the ironic tone of one who is frequently aware that none of the kinds of dis-
course he deploys can fully apprehend the experience in front of him. I say
"he" and "him" because I suspect that the book makes visible this embarrass-
ment of the narrator as a way of exploring and gently satirizing the public
voice that many nineteenth-century readers would have expected from
"George Eliot."
'Page references in this essay are to the Clarendon edition of Middlemarch,
ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
7Clarendon edn., ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980),
p. 238.
8Cf. Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory
and Fictional Form (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), p. 91; Mary
Wilson Carpenter, George Eliot and the Landscape of Time: Narrative Form and
Protestant Apocalyptic History (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press,
1986), pp. 107-11, 208, notes 12, 14, and 16.
9J. Hillis Miller, "Narrative and History," ELH 41, 3 (Fall 1974): 455-73;
Ginsburg, pp. 554 f.
'?Miller, "Narrative and History," pp. 459 f.
"Cf. U.C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot's Early Novels: The Limits of Realism
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968), pp. 15-16, 28-34; Michael McKeon,
The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1 740 (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 384, 405-409. Knoepflmacher claims that
George Eliot "made sure to dissociate herself from his [Fielding's] example."
But the passage under consideration articulates connections with Fielding at

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790 MIDDLEMARCH' S NARRATIVE VOICE

the same time as it points out differences. Kno

Fielding's ironic self-consciousness about literar
405409), a quality in his writing that George Eli
continues, while recognizing the new distances
anonymous culture.
'2Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A
Those Who Lawfully May, and of Those Who M
as This"), the Wesleyan edition, 2 vols., ed. Fred
duction and commentary by Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Oxford and
Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1975), p. 487.
'5Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-
Believe of Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984); George
Levine, "The Scientific Texture of Middlemarch," from The Realistic Imagina-
tion: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1981), rpt. in George Eliot, ed. Harold Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 187-202; Felicia Bonaparte, Will and Destiny: Mo-
rality and Tragedy in George Eliot's Novels (New York: New York Univ. Press,
1975), esp. chap. 2; Robert A. Greenberg, "Plexuses and Ganglia: Scientific
Allusion in Middlemarch," NCF 30, 1 (June 1975): 33-52; Michael York Ma-
son, "Middlemarch and Science: Problems of Life and Mind," RES n.s. 22, 86
(May 1971): 151-69; U.C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot's Early Novels, and
"Middlemarch: The Balance of Progress," in Religious Humanism and the Victo-
rian Novel: George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1965); and BernardJ. Paris, Experiments in Life: George Eliot's Quest
for Values (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1965).
'Cf. Graver, pp. 66 f. No doubt George Eliot was influenced by the Com-
parative Method of Comte, Spencer, and Tonnies, but her art is a good deal
more ironic than a summary of its intellectual influences can suggest.
15Cf. Steven Marcus, "Literature and Social Theory: Starting in with George
Eliot," in Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Random
House, 1975), pp. 196-200, 206 f.
"Cf. Bonaparte, p. 80: Dorothea is not a St. Theresa, "but only someone
who wishes she had been."
l'Cf. Shuttleworth, pp. 14246; George Levine, "George Eliot's Hypothesis
of Reality," NCF 35, 1 (June 1980): 7-15; Levine, "The Scientific Texture of
Middlemarch," p. 201; John P. McGowan, "The Turn of George Eliot's
Realism," NCF 35, 2 (September 1980): 174 f.; Alan Mintz, George Eliot and
the Novel of Vocation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 97-102;
Bonaparte, pp. 3-12; Paris, pp. 25-51, 116-26. These critics have assumed,
without distinguishing author from narrator, that Lydgate embodies a positive
representation of George Eliot's own practice as a novelist.
"Cf. Hardy, p. 116: "there is no President of the Immortals" sporting with
George Eliot's characters.
"Cf. Alexander Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail (Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 253-56.
20Cf. Neil D. Isaacs, "Middlemarch: Crescendo of Obligatory Drama," NCF
18, 1 (June 1963): 21-34, 28-31: George Eliot talks about her characters with-
out ever "giving the impression that she is pulling the strings."
21U.C. Knoepflmacher, Laughter and Despair: Readings in Ten Novels of the
Victorian Era (Berkeley and London: Univ. of California Press, 1971), p. xii.

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 J OHN L. T U C K E R 791

2Quoted inJohn Holmstrom and Laurence Le

her Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Review
1966), p. 106.
23Macmillan's Magazine (April 1861), quoted in Holmstrom and Lerner, pp.
3841.
24Graver, p. 10.
25Saturday Review (14 April 1860), quoted in Holmstrom and Lerner,
28 f.
26Levine, "George Eliot's Hypothesis of Reality," pp. 1-28; Levine, "
Scientific Texture of Middlemarch," pp. 187-202.

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