Eliot, George

But Why Always George Eliot? Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun and Middlemarch

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

(cross-posted)

As I have posted several times here (and there) about my unfolding project on Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun, I thought it was only fair to post the conference paper I delivered on Sunday at ACCUTE, which is the first concrete result of the research and thinking I have done so far. Tempering justice with mercy, I won’t put the entire paper, especially because I can’t figure out how to put only the first bit on my front page. The paper was written to be read aloud, and the time limit was strict (20 minutes): both of these requirements have certain effects on both style and substance. Beyond that, I have only myself to blame. In italics is some material I wasn’t sure I’d have time to read (mostly, I didn’t). And so, without further hemming and hawing…

But Why Always George Eliot? Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun and Middlemarch

Ahdaf Soueif’s 1992 novel In the Eye of the Sun has been called ‘the Egyptian Middlemarch,’ a comparison invited by its numerous intertextual gestures towards George Eliot’s masterpiece—most conspicuously, its epigraph is the famous ‘squirrel’s heartbeat’ passage. Critical work on the novel so far has focused on Soueif as a postcolonial writer and thus on her Arab or Egyptian perspective, on issues of national identity or the possibilities of “cultural dialogue” (Massad 74), and on her works as examples of cultural and linguistic hybridity (Darraj, Malak). Though I believe that these are not just inevitable but also illuminating approaches to Soueif’s fiction, including In the Eye of the Sun, I also think it is important not to limit the range of questions we ask of a text because it appears to fit into a particular category (in this case, the postcolonial novel). In doing so we risk enacting a kind of literary essentialism by which our interpretation of a text is determined by the geographical origins of its author. Priya Joshi notes that the “persistent critical reference to writing from once colonial lands as postcolonial” may inhibit attention to their particularities:

When does it end? For how many years after empire ends does writing have to be “post” before it can become itself? . . . does it ever end or does all literature from once colonized lands always bear the stamp that comes with the appellation “colonial”? . . . The danger, therefore, of preserving any part of the term “postcolonial” is that it ultimately eviscerates the possibility of conducting a historically grounded or specifically directed study. . . . (233)

A particular danger seems to me to be that reading a text as “postcolonial” means fixing it in a certain relation to the world, and especially to the literature of the “colonizer”–often viewed within postcolonial studies as “a vehicle for imperial authority” (Tiffin et al.). The work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and many others on the ways 19th-century novels are “implicated” or even complicit in imperialism, for instance, has established a near-normative paradigm that predisposes us to find a confrontational (or at least corrective) relationship between a “postcolonial” author or critic and any given Victorian text he or she might invoke. I will argue that Soueif’s allusions to Middlemarch work against this oppositional paradigm. Rather than writing back against Eliot’s novel, Souief writes with it, sharing and extending some of its central ideas about how we perceive and live in the world, ideas that are not determined by national identities or other historical contingencies but appeal to “a commonality of human experience beyond politics, beyond forms” (In the Eye of the Sun 754). The two novels coexist, that is, in a literary version of the space defined by Soueif in her non-fiction writing as the ‘mezzaterra,’ or common ground. There, “differences [are] interesting rather than threatening, because they [are] foregrounded against a backdrop of affinities” (Mezzaterra 7).

I’m going to use the rest of my time to bring out what I see as “affinities” between Eliot’s novel and Soueif’s. I’ll start with some basic information about Soueif and In the Eye of the Sun (assuming that most of you are familiar with Middlemarch). Like Asya al-Ulama, the protagonist of In the Eye of the Sun, Ahdaf Soueif was raised and educated in both England and Egypt. Though she began publishing fiction (written in English) as early as 1983, In the Eye of the Sun was her first full-length novel. It attracted a lot of mostly positive attention from high-profile critics including Edward Said (in the TLS), Frank Kermode (in the LRB), and Hilary Mantel (in the NYRB). Essentially a Bildungsroman in its structure, the novel is heavily autobiographical. Like Soueif, Asya, the child of Cairo University professors, is raised in a cosmopolitan milieu in which English language and culture are as familiar as Egyptian or Arabic. Also like Soueif, Asya aims to follow her mother into the University’s English Department (“To hear her father when he had to give his occupation for some form or another say ‘University professor,’ you would know for sure there was no other job in the world worth having” [450]). While an undergraduate at CU she falls in love with Saif Madi, older, worldly, self-confident. Though Asya somewhat inexplicably adores him, from the beginning there are hints that all will not go well with them: Saif makes Asya feel tongue-tied, naïve, inadequate (“I talk plenty to everyone else, but he seems so clever, I just don’t want to look stupid in front of him by saying something not particularly profound” [107]); to suit his taste, she begins choosing clothes that are “much more subdued,” mostly beige (227, cf 651). One of their most serious early conflicts is on an unexpected subject. “’What was the argument about?’” Asya’s mother asks Asya’s friend Chrissie:

‘It was about George Eliot, Tante’
‘George Eliot? … But why were they arguing about George Eliot?’ ‘I think Asya was saying she was a great writer and he was saying she wasn’t.’
‘I thought you were supposed to care about literature. [Asya protests]. . . And anyway that wasn’t what it was about, it was about him. He hasn’t read her and yet he can sit there and say she’s not worth reading. If it’s not Sartre or the Spanish Civil War or Camus or someone he already knows than it’s worth nothing. . . . I thought he was…available to—to life. But he’s got a closed mind. He actually makes me think of that passage where she says Mr. Casaubon’s mind is like a—an enclosed basin. (298)

As Asya says, George Eliot is here really just the occasion for one of a series of struggles between Asya and Saif that, whatever their explicit topic, really turn on Asya’s right to her own point of view. The alienation between them worsens during the years Asya is in England studying (as Soueif did) for her Ph.D.; for Asya, the failure of their sex life (in nine years they never fully consummate their marriage) becomes both symbol and symptom of the deeper failure of intimacy between them.

Disillusioned by the realities of both her married life and her (dull and unrewarding) scholarship, Asya resolves to resign herself to her narrowed lot, to

create meaning in her life by striving to be the best person she can, not in the ways that appeal to her, not by spooning aid porridge into the mouths of rows of starving children or bringing comfort to shrapnelled soldiers or . . . or writing Middlemarch, but in the more difficult way that has been allotted to her—for the moment—and to draw strength that while she is doing her best for those whose lives most immediately touch her own, she is not at a standstill; she is working towards making her own life the way she wants it. (462-3)

But Asya finds renunciation “á la Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke” very difficult (303), and eventually in her frustration and loneliness, she begins an affair with an English business student, Gerald Stone. Characters from 19th-century novels continue to serve as her reference points:

You’ve committed adultery, you’ve done it, [she reflects after her first night with Gerald] you’ve joined Anna and Emma and parted company forever with Dorothea and Maggie—although Dorothea would have understood—would she? Yes, she would; she would not have approved, she would have urged her to renounce, to stop, to send him away—but she would have understood; she had a great capacity for understanding. (541)

The affair is sexually liberating for her, but unfortunately Gerald proves shallow and emotionally parasitic. Eventually she confesses the affair to Saif; although she insists it is meaningless and Gerald is “irrelevant,” Saif is outraged, and the resulting conflicts, some of them violent, destroy the remnants of their marriage. Asya eventually does complete her doctorate and then returns to Egypt, not only to teach English literature, but to work with a program offering sex education and birth control to Egyptian village women.

Aside from Soueif’s intertextual allusions, there’s not a lot in In the Eye of the Sun that brings Middlemarch immediately to mind. Their plots have little in common besides the bad marriages. Futile scholarship is another shared element, though, as Said remarked, “in many ways Asya is her own Casaubon” (her Ph.D. research, for instance, is essentially a key to all metaphors, and she stores her index cards in stacks of boxes reminiscent of Casaubon’s pigeonholes [379]). Both are very long books! But other overt parallels are hard to discern. The novels diverge most significantly in their forms. Middlemarch, of course, presents a web of complexly interrelated plots and characters unified by the narrator’s sage moral, philosophical, and historical commentary. The novel’s subtitle, ‘A Study of Provincial Life,’ indicates its aspirations to breadth and objectivity. As my overview of In the Eye of the Sun shows, Soueif’s novel in contrast is intensely personal, a priority also reflected in its form—as a Bildungsroman, it focuses almost entirely on Asya and is told almost entirely from Asya’s point of view. No narrative interventions put her experiences in broader perspective.

These differences might seem like indications that Soueif rejects the premises of Eliot’s formal choices: that comprehensive understanding (promised via multiple plots) and universal norms (established via the narrator’s commentary) are discredited in Soueif’s postmodern, postcolonial world. If this were the case, we would, I think, be led towards an interpretation of In the Eye of the Sun as an example of postcolonial ‘talking back,’ or at least revision, asserting difference, contingency, and resistance in the face of imperialistic presumptions of universality. Such a reading would be consistent with Amin Malak’s claim that “dislocation between the realm of Western literature and the reality of the Middle Eastern world constitutes a leitmotific feature that runs throughout Soueif’s fiction” (134).Yet these conclusions seem inadequate to the actual uses of Middlemarch (and, just btw, other “Western” texts) in Soueif’s novel and to the similarities in theme and ethos that the novels manifest despite their surface differences.

For instance, though In the Eye of the Sun is far more focused on one individual life than Middlemarch, Asya’s story is carefully placed and contextualized historically. The Six Day War breaks out as Asya studies for her university entrance exams in 1967; as the novel proceeds we learn of Nasser’s sudden death and the decline of his version of pan-Arabism; we watch the dawning of the Sadat era; we hear about the beginnings of civil war in Lebanon; we witness, on Asya’s return to Cairo in 1980, the increased Islamist influence signalled particularly by the presence in her classroom of veiled students. The stories of Asya’s friends and family also put human faces on regional conflicts and politics: her friend Chrissie loses a lover in the 1967 war; her friend Noora marries a Palestinian, Bassam, and as a consequence is disowned by her family; her sister Deena’s husband Muhsin ends up in the infamous Tora prison for leftist activism against Sadat’s government. Malak points to this integration of “the private history of a woman and her family with the political history of the nation” (146) as a typical feature of postcolonial writing; a Victorianist would also readily identify it as a form of the “history by indirection” typical of novels by Scott, Thackeray or George Eliot, which also portray and thematize intersections between private and public life, between the individual and the historical.

I’d like to walk through two more examples of subtle but persistent thematic congruity between In the Eye of the Sun and Middlemarch, both of which, I think, further discourage an oppositional or postcolonial reading of the relationship between these two novels and move us towards the idea of a literary mezzaterra or common ground…

[Here I move into a comparison of the passages I looked at in this post, arguing that although they seem very different, overall both novels move us towards the same conclusion: that sympathy is the antidote to cruelty or suffering, on whatever scale. Then I argue that, while urging the necessity of acknowleding that everyone has, as Eliot’s narrator says, “an equivalent center of self,” the novels also dramatize the necessity of acknowleding your individual needs, a particular challenge for the female protagonists.]

One answer to the question “why always George Eliot,” then, is that despite their different origins and contexts, and despite the conspicuous differences in the particulars of their novels, there are strong affinities between Soueif’s vision or ethos in In The Eye of the Sun and Eliot’s in Middlemarch. I suppose this might seem an unremarkable conclusion, given that Soueif signals as much by her choice of epigraph (!). But in fact in the context of postcolonial discourse there is something unexpected about it. It points us towards a theory of literary relations according to which Middlemarch need not be read as the Western text and In the Eye of the Sun the Eastern—or Middlemarch need not represent Victorian literature, or English literature, or colonial literature and In the Eye of the Sun need not be, or stand for, Egyptian, or Arabic, or post-colonial perspectives. This need not be seen as returning us to a problematic universalism. For one thing, both Soueif and Eliot are too intensely conscious of the role of history in determining character and values. Instead, I want to come back to the notion of the mezzaterra, an arena in which “differences are foregrounded against a background of affinities.” Said concludes his review of In the Eye of the Sun with a question that (especially coming from him) cannot be seen as wholly rhetorical: “Who cares about the labels of national identity anyway?” (19). Soueif’s sympathetic invocations of Middlemarch (or, I would also add, her entirely non-ironic choice of a line of Kipling for her title) show setting aside such labels, including the label “postcolonial,” lets us focus on things we share (including our global literary inheritance) and thus “inhabit and broaden the common ground”(Mezzaterra 23). (Said: “In fact, there can be generosity, and vision, and overcoming barriers, and, finally, human existential integrity.”)

The Other Sides of Silence

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I’ve begun trying to organize my ideas about In the Eye of the Sun. At this point I’m finding that the questions and confusions in my head about the novel’s relationship to Middlemarch are increasing rather settling into some kind of order. I’m hopeful, of course, that this mental chaos, while disconcerting this close to my conference deadline, is evidence of the interest and complexity of the interpretive project I’ve undertaken, as well as of the wider range of ideas I’ve brought to my latest re-reading of Soueif’s novel thanks to my excursions into postcolonial theory, modern Egyptian history, the story of Cairo University, and other materials directly by or about Ahdaf Soueif. I often reassure my thesis students that things inevitably get messy for a while, especially in the ‘discovery’ phase, when you are moving past the provisional hypotheses of your research proposal and actually looking at how the pieces you’ve assembled relate to each other and finding out the ‘unknown unknowns’ (a much-derided phrase I’ve always felt some sympathy for, despite its source, as one of the great challenges of research is precisely that you don’t always know what you don’t know until your work is well underway).

In any case, one thing I do know at this point is that time constraints–not just for the writing of the conference paper, but also for its presentation–mean I couldn’t address all the potential angles that have occurred to me even if I did sort them all out. So my main task in the next couple of days is setting the limits for this version of the paper, which I hope over the summer to develop into the fuller, more wide-ranging form envisaged in the proposal I submitted. I’m thinking right now of focusing quite specifically on the novel’s most overt gesture towards Middlemarch, which is its epigraph, taken from the famous ‘squirrel’s heartbeat’ passage in Chapter 20:

…and we do not expect people to be moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of 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 for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die on that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

There are a number of passages in In the Eye of the Sun which (on my reading, anyway) invoke a “roar … on the other side of silence,” but it is not easy to see just how they engage with this moment in Eliot’s novel–whether, for instance, they reflect, extend, or critique it. Here is one such passage, for example, from Part VI of Soueif’s novel. It is 1971 and the protagonist, Asya al-Ulama, is with her friends studying for their exam in 20th century poetry. One of the company is Bassam, a Palestinian; thinking about his experience of “living under occupation” leads Asya to a wider meditation on “all those bruised people: Palestinians, Armenians, Kurds, and of course the Jews themselves,” and then on “all the things that are happening right now … as they sit here studying for their poetry exam:”

secret deals being arranged in government departments, counterdeals in secret service meetings, ignorant armies moving silently by night,* people being thrown out of their houses, babies being tortured, people being tortured–this is the point where Asya’s mind starts to do a loop. People being tortured. Right now. As we sit here. Tortured. And what do we do? We go on studying for our exams. . . . But what else is to be done? What can be done? Can you get up right now and rush off to some prison — assuming you know where one is — and hammer at the door? … No. No, well, of course not, that’s stupid — and yet how can you just go on sitting here while someone somewhere is having live wires pushed up his rectum, his teeth pulled out of his head, her vagina stuffed with hungry rats, or having to watch her baby’s head being smashed against the —

Asya jumps up. She always jumps up when she gets to this bit. Now she goes out on the balcony and stands holding on to the stone balustrade and breathing fast and looking at the lights of the Officer’s Club. She daren’t look up at the sky because the darkness and the stars will make her think of how the earth is a tiny ball spinning round and round in space, and space is something she cannot even being to imagine.

When these panics come over her, Asya copes by trying not to think. It is easy to see not just the comfort but the necessity of being, as Eliot concludes even the best of us is, “well wadded with stupidity.”

Both passages turn on the possibility of being overwhelmed by too full an awareness of suffering in the world. But the specifics of that suffering seem very different. Dorothea is sad in Chapter XX because she has married the wrong man, because the “new real future which replaces the imaginary” for her is such a disappointment. The narrator acknowledges that her situation is commonplace and that to see it as a tragedy requires a recalibration of “tragic” to accommodate something so unexceptional. Much of the moral pressure of Middlemarch is precisely in this direction: towards extending our sympathies to those suffering through the petty trials of “ordinary human life.” The novel, we might say, encourages us to listen for the squirrel’s heartbeat, to risk casting off some of that protective padding (constituted largely of egotism), as Dorothea, in her sorrow, is just beginning to do:

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness that is no longer reflection but feeling — an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects — that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.**

On the other side of silence in Middlemarch, then, we have a vast accumulation of “equivalent centre[s] of self,” and the roar we hear (if, unlike Mr Brooke, we go “too far”) is a cacophony of personal feelings.

In contrast, in In the Eye of the Sun we hear “men from the Muslim Brotherhood [who have been] pumped up, blown full of water,” and then jumped on and exploded–screams of literal, physical (not metaphorical, moral, or spiritual) pain. Such acts are, indeed, unthinkable, and yet they are part of the everyday reality of Asya’s world: not of her everyday experience, of course, but part of the news she reads, the stories and rumours that circulate among her friends and family, the fears and motivations of people she knows. It is possible to find Dorothea’s “faintness of heart” at learning of Mr Casaubon’s deficiencies trivial by comparison to the sufferings enumerated in Asya’s versions of “Hamlet-like raving” about “all the trouble of all the people in the world” (Middlemarch Chapter 77)–and if In the Eye of the Sun were a different novel overall, I think this contrast might propel me towards a reading of it as critical of Middlemarch, taking the passage from Chapter XX as its epigraph in an ironic spirit (at best) and trying to show up the political inadequacy of its highly “self”-centered morality. I don’t think this is how the epigraph is in fact refracted through Soueif’s novel, though. My task for work tomorrow (if our ritual departmental “May Marks Meeting” allows) will be trying to explain why… I think it has something to do with the interplay of personal and political in both cases (both exemplify what Jerome Beatty calls “history by indirection”), and with the specific relationship of Dorothea and Asya to their husbands (within story space) and to the form of their novels.

(Trying to put even this much into something clear enough to post has been very helpful: I feel that I have, at least provisionally, cleaned up a little of the mess.)

*I just caught the echo of “Dover Beach” here, another tempting bit of intertextuality. That’s what I mean by things getting messier.
**Middlemarch is such a wonderful book.

This Week in My Classes (February 11, 2009)

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It’s all about violence in both classes this week–Chandler, Hammett, and mean streets in Mystery and Detective Fiction, and the struggle for survival in Victorian Literature of Faith and Doubt. Now that I think about it, another interesting commonality is that in both contexts the violence is approached with detachment: cool, wry cynicism in the hard-boiled detective stories and scientific curiosity in Darwin.

Today in particular I wanted to loosen everybody up: in the faith and doubt seminar, discussion continues to be a bit lackluster compared to what I’m used to in fiction-focused classes (is it me or them or the material? probably some of each), and in the mystery class, the larger format and the wide range of material (all requiring a good dose of literary and historical context to set up the examples) means more straight lecturing than I ordinarily do. In both courses, though, the goal is always to enable them to carry on well-informed, precise conversations about the material themselves, so it is crucial for me to shut up (or at least quiet down) sometimes and let them try out the ideas and skills we’ve been accumulating.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction today, then, I asked them to use our reading, Chandler’s (long) short story (is it really a novella?) “Trouble Is My Business,” as the chief exhibit in a debate about the literary capacity of genre fiction. We read “The Simple Art of Murder” for Monday, in which Chandler claims that Hammett proved “the detective story can be important writing.” In making this case he focuses primarily on Hammett’s realism, but he also argues for the effectiveness of Hammett’s prose for his purposes. So I invited them to hold his story up to that standard, or indeed to any standard they might have for what makes literature “important.” Half of them were asked to develop the argument for its importance, the other half against. They rose well to the challenge. Originality, realism, style, and depth seemed to be the basic qualities they expected to find in important literature–but, as we’ve discussed more than once this term, originality in particular is a tricky question when dealing with genre fiction, as it is defined through its adherence to conventions. Some of the more interesting specific debates were about Chandler’s language, from the tough talk (how realistic is that smart-alec patter? and if it’s not realistic, do we appreciate it for other reasons?) to the “poetic” language (all those colorful similes! or are they too often cliches?). One of my own standards for importance is having ideas–not necessarily being overtly or didactically philosophical, but engaging us by aesthetic means in a process of thought about something that matters, something below or beyond the mechanics of plot. I didn’t think “Trouble Is My Business” offered much in the way of ideas. I do think The Maltese Falcon does–which is why I agree with Chandler’s assessment of its merits. In any case, the main point was to let them exercise their wits on the readings and test some assumptions about how they might (or do) judge different forms of writing. Are we satisfied with concluding that something is good “of its kind,” or do we accept a hierarchy of kinds? When the more relativist position was put forward at one point, I asked how many would choose not to see a film simply on the grounds of the kind of film it was–a large majority raised their hands. While this could be considered simply an expression of taste (“I just don’t like things of that kind”), if pressed, I think we would defend our tastes, or our choices, on the grounds that some kinds of things seem more worth our while than others–not our taste in ice cream or pizza, of course, or of red wine over white, but our taste in something requiring intellectual and emotional engagement, such as a book or a movie. I think this is a worthwhile conversation to have, if only to keep us thinking about why we like or value the things we do. I was pleased to get a lot of participation, including from people who had not put up their hands before.

In the faith and doubt seminar, I also devised a discussion exercise. We’re reading excerpts from Darwin this week and a large part of what I want them to take away from it is a sense of how awareness of Darwin’s scientific work and theories affects literary forms and interests in other writers we’ll be reading. Scholars such as Gillian Beer and George Levine have done wonderful work showing how diffusive the influence of Darwin was on Victorian poets and novelists, from bringing scientific topics explicitly into their work to encouraging different ways of looking at the world or conceiving of the work of the novelist–no longer, for instance, modelled after the creative design of God but after the observations and inquiries of the natural historian. I made up a handout with excerpts from different works and invited them to consider how they might read through a ‘post-Darwinist’ lens: what ideas or strategies in the writing do they pick up on, what detail becomes more telling? Here are a couple of the passages I gave them:

I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now noticed a decided similarity between the dog’s way of eating, and the man’s. The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast; and he looked sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought there was danger in every direction, of somebody’s coming to take the pie away. He was altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to appreciate it comfortably, I thought, or to have anybody to dine with him, without making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all of which particulars he was very like the dog.

It is one of those old, old towns, which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature as much as the nests of the bower birds or the winding galleries of the white ants: a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history, like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it from the camp on the hill-side, and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the land. It is a town ‘familiar with forgotten years.’

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 seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures 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, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader’s match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed.

In general terms, we’ve talked about how Darwin’s theory gives everything a history (or, as he says in Origins, a genealogy), as well as emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things. It starts to become clear why Henry James would have complained that Middlemarch is “too often an echo of Mssrs Darwin and Huxley”–not a reading that I think would come intuitively to the modern reader, so accustomed have we become to Darwinian ways of seeing.

Being Good Without God

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Our local bus company is refusing to carry ads from Humanist Canada because they “could be controversial and upsetting.” The dangerous text? “You can be good without God.” Controversial and upsetting? Isn’t this just a fact? Throughout history and around the world, people without a belief in “God” (by which, in common usage, we mean the God of the major monotheisms)–whether humanists, skeptics, agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, etc.–have lived highly moral lives; many of them have also contributed substantially to the development of a more just, good, and beautiful society. It’s outrageous, and should be plenty “controversial and upsetting,” to insist otherwise. Is the side of a bus the appropriate place to convey this common sense message? Well, I don’t see why not: a pretty wide range of goods, services, and opinions are advertised there already. And the comment that “the transit authority would reconsider its position if Humanist Canada toned down its message” is truly stunning. Nothing about “you can be good without God” is an overstatement, and the tone is no more than declarative. It’s a far less provocative message than the one on display in London, “There’s probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life”–and even that is much more evasive than any religious billboard or bumper sticker I’ve ever seen (now that this “truth in advertising” precedent has been set, can we look forward to signs that read “Jesus Maybe Saves,” or pronouncements that “There is probably no god but Allah”?). But it’s not Metro Transit’s decision that really irks me, but the immediate and predictable storm of protest that this represents an unacceptable assault by atheists on religion. Again, it’s a fact that religion is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for virtue. The level of “debate” in the comments thread at the CBC site is so abysmal I can’t see any value in contributing to it. Instead, here is a re-run of a related post from my archives. Embedded in it is an excerpt from a conference paper I presented at ACCUTE in 2006 called “George Eliot: Moralist for the 21st Century.” Today I would particularly draw attention to the quotation near the end of the post from Eliot’s essay “Worldiness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young”:

‘And in opposition to your theory that a belief in immortality is the only source of virtue, I maintain that, so far as moral action is dependent on that belief, so far the emotion which prompts it is not truly moral—is still in the stage of egoism, and has not yet attained the higher development of sympathy. In proportion as a man would care less for the rights and the welfare of his fellow, if he did not believe in a future life, in that proportion is he wanting in the genuine feelings of justice and benevolence…‘

Compelling arguments can be made, in fact, that being good because of God (while obviously better than being bad) is a lesser form of morality, one that substitutes extrinsic reasons, hope of reward, and fear of punishment for a commitment to the intrinsic value of doing what is good and right.

George Eliot: the Friendly Face of Unbelief (originally posted June 25, 2007)

I’ve read a number of reviews lately on the spate of books by the ‘new atheists,’ notably Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and, most recently, Christopher Hitchens. Among the many interesting features of these reviews is how often they protest against the tone of the books, even if they agree with their arguments. A lot of people seem worried that a world without religion will be either a coldly austere, heartless place, or a chaotic place with no moral principles or values drawing people into communities. The complaints about the harsh tone of these books seem motivated by these fears, as well as by the widespread (but, as Harris especially would argue, misguided) attitude that whatever our own views on religion, we ought to treat it with respect. They are also often accompanied by the complaint that writers like Dawkins and Harris are taking away beliefs that bring comfort or satisfy emotional and aesthetic needs, without offering up anything to replace them.

I don’t personally think there is any obligation for critics of religion to be nice, or for them to make up for whatever people may feel has been taken away from them along with their superstitions. And, in fact, all three of the writers I have named have plenty to say about ways an atheistic worldview can enhance, rather than inhibit, our emotional, moral, and aesthetic experiences and sensibilities. But it’s clear that their case is not always persuasive, particularly to those readers who most need persuading. Because I think the world would benefit if they were victorious in their campaign on behalf of reason and evidence, I think they should call in some allies who can help them past what may be primarily a problem of genre. In addition to making the case against religion, they need to help people move imaginatively towards a world in which it is no longer necessary. Who better to assist in this endeavour than George Eliot, who was, as noted by one of her contemporaries, “the first great godless writer of fiction”?

Of the three writers I’ve named, Hitchens makes the most explicit appeal to literature. In god is not Great, he remarks that atheists “are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books” (5). Later, he notes that the “study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected” (283). This general position is one with which I have great sympathy; it is also one which, though without explicit reference to replacing theistic moral systems, is much considered in the work of contemporary moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum who are exploring the contributions literary forms make towards our ethical understanding. But Hitchens could get a lot more specific about just how George Eliot is useful to his project. Here are some excerpts from my paper “George Eliot: Moralist for the 21st Century” that suggest how her ideas, particularly as given literary form through her fiction, might complement his and the others’ work and contribute to forming what Ronald Aronson in The Nation describes as “coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer life’s vital questions.”

[A recent University of Minnesota study] found that many people consider atheists “self-interested individuals who are not concerned with the common good” (Edgell et al. 227). The researchers conclude that “Americans construct the atheist as the symbolic representation of one who rejects the basis for moral solidarity and cultural membership in American society altogether” (230). However contingent the relationship between morality and religion may seem in academic or philosophic circles (witness the decisive critiques of divine command theory in analytic ethics, for example), most of our real-world compatriots are convinced that morality will break down without religion, with dire consequences for human flourishing. To correct this mistake—to lay these fears to rest—we could really use George Eliot’s help.

As her contemporaries noted, George Eliot’s novels portray “a world of high endeavour, pure morality, and strong enthusiasm, existing and in full work, without any reference to, or help from, the thought of God” (Mallock 698). After her own de-conversion from Christianity, Eliot worked tirelessly to develop a secular, humanistic framework for morality. As is well known, she believed, with Feuerbach, that people have given the name “God” to qualities and aspirations of their own, that motives and accomplishments called “religious” and credited to supernatural forces are really the products of human effort, of the human capacity for generosity, sympathy, and love—but also egotism, pettiness, and hatred. In her deterministic universe, we are responsible for our own deeds and their consequences, for our own contributions to, or obstructions of, the “growing good of the world” (Finale). She rejected extrinsic motives for good behaviour, including appeals to the “glory of God” or hope of an afterlife, arguing eloquently that “the immediate impulse of love or justice … alone makes an action truly moral” (rev. of Constance Herbert 322). These are components of an ethos that seems highly conducive to “moral solidarity” and “the common good.”

More important than her specific conclusions, though, is her resolve to work with the facts of human existence rather than comforting fictions. She did not deny the austerity of non-belief, but she agrees with Harris that “the fact that unjustified beliefs can have a consoling influence on the human mind is no argument in their favour” (67). The “‘highest calling and election’,” she asserted, “is to do without opium and live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance” (Letter 254).

Other examples of George Eliot’s own statements on the relationship between faith and morality include this, from “Worldiness and Other-Worldiness: The Poet Young”:

‘And in opposition to your theory that a belief in immortality is the only source of virtue, I maintain that, so far as moral action is dependent on that belief, so far the emotion which prompts it is not truly moral—is still in the stage of egoism, and has not yet attained the higher development of sympathy. In proportion as a man would care less for the rights and the welfare of his fellow, if he did not believe in a future life, in that proportion is he wanting in the genuine feelings of justice and benevolence…’

And this, from her letters, a simple statement that would have revolutionary consequences if applied instead of many of the doctrines put forward in the world’s sacred books:

Our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joys.

These are all philosophical statements, but George Eliot opted to give her ideas fictional form so that we would not just understand them intellectually, but experience them as principles operating in the world of human feelings, histories, and relationships. I have written more about this choice elsewhere. For my purposes now, I’ll just say that this choice of genres allows her to show us morality and community both flourishing and faltering as the result of human character and human choices. The mathematician Laplace famously replied to Napoleon, when asked about the role of God in his view of the universe, that he had “no need of that hypothesis.” Through her novels, George Eliot helps us understand that we too have no need of it, and that we will do better by ourselves and by others when we acknowledge our own responsibility for the world we live in and the rules we live by.

The Little Child Had Come to Link Him Once More with the Whole World

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No, not that child, though there is a seasonal allusion. I’m rereading Silas Marner and finding it every bit as good a secular fable for the holidays as A Christmas Carol–better, even, as the inspiring transformation of a lonely and bitter miser in this case is entirely the result of human accident, agency, and love. Here’s poor Silas, bereft at the loss of his gold:

Silas spent his Christmas-day in loneliness, eating his meat in sadness of heart . . . . In the morning he looked out on the black frost that seemed to press cruelly on every blade of grass, while the half-icy red pool shivered under the bitter wind; but towards the evening the snow began to fall, and curtained from him even that dreary outlook, shutting him close up with his narrow grief. And he sat in his robbed home through the livelong evening, not caring to close his shutters or lock his door, pressing his head between his hands and moaning, until the cold grasped him and told him that his fire was grey.

It’s no supernatural visitor, but a golden-haired child who stirs “old quiverings of tenderness” in Silas’s bruised heart, animates his past, present, and future, and restores him to the human community:

[I]n this way, as the weeks grew to months, the child created fresh links between his life and the lives from which he had hitherto shrunk continually into narrower isolation. Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must be worshipped in close-locked solitude–which was hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song of birds, and started to no human tones–Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living movement; making trial of everything, with trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her. The gold had kept his thoughts in an every-repeated circle, leading to nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward . . . . The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and made him think all its pauses a holiday, re-awakening his senses with her fresh life . . . and warming him into joy because she had joy. . . .

In the old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.

This Week in My Classes (November 25, 2008)

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It’s the last full week of classes–unbelievable, how fast the term goes by. That means it is wrapping up time. It would be nice if the end of a course could feel like a culmination and a triumph. Instead, it’s always a struggle to keep the momentum (and the attendance) up and the focus on the intrinsic interest and merits of our work. In my new-found cynicism, I now always save one “surprise” quiz for the last day of class, to maximize the number of students who will actually be there for my closing perorations. I do think there is more at stake than what will be on the exam, and I like to take a little time during our last meeting to say a few things about that; it’s disheartening if nobody is there to listen! So coercion is my little helper.

In Introduction to Prose and Fiction, the students’ final papers are due next week. As it is a designated Writing Requirement course, we are supposed to spend time explicitly on writing, so I have scheduled two class hours this week for editing workshops. Last time, they did peer editing. I always have to fight my fear that peer editing is simply a case of the blind leading the blind; I have almost never seen evidence on their drafts or worksheets that I’m wrong about this, but I remain committed to the principle that it is good to read and edit other people’s work, and also that it is excellent to finish a full draft a week before the final due date so that you have at least the opportunity to improve it before you submit it. This time I am asking them to edit their own essays. I think this is an even harder task, and yet in many ways, for a writer, nothing is more important than learning to look critically on your own writing, to achieve enough distance to identify weaknesses in your arguments or evidence, and to develop the fortitude to mess with something you worked hard to produce in the first place. Their worksheet includes a “reverse outline” exercise: the idea is to produce an outline working backwards from the draft, checking as you go whether you have in fact put all the parts in place that you need. One small detail I have come to see as important, though it often seems trivial at first, is whether they have a strong title for the paper. In my experience, a bland (“English Essay”), vague (“Interpreting The Remains of the Day), or simply missing title is a symptom of an essay without a strong organizing idea. We’ll see how it goes. At the very least, again, they have won themselves a few days to reconsider their first try. Many of them will not take advantage of the time they have to rewrite (they tend to tinker with individual words, rather than move pieces around, reconsider their thesis, or choose better examples). But those who are motivated and listening to our advice will end up with much better essays, which ultimately makes our work of grading them more pleasant too.

In The Nineteenth-Century Novel, we are nearly through The Mill on the Floss. After emphasizing last week how important the long, detailed account of Maggie and Tom’s childhood is because it prepares us (and them) for the complexities of their adult decisions, now we are getting to the moral heart of the book: Maggie’s struggle with the conflict between her own needs and desires, and the demands of her conscience and her duty to family and her past. So far this week we’ve focused on the limitations of available stories or narratives for Maggie (helped along by Carolyn Heilbrun, in Writing a Woman’s Life, for instance, and Nancy Miller’s “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Ficton”). We can take this issue up fairly literally by considering Maggie’s reading of Thomas a Kempis, and a bit more literarily by considering the significance of the Scott novels with which Philip courts her, and which lead to her famous resolution to “read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness.” Sadly, of course, her quest to read, much less live, a story “where the dark woman triumphs,” “to avenge Rebecca and Flora MacIvor, and Minna and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones,” is doomed. To help explain why, I’ve handed around copies of George Eliot’s essay “The Antigone and Its Moral: the analysis she offers of the intractable opposition of competing goods clarifies at least one way of understanding the structure of the novel’s ending, though we’ll have to get into specifics of Maggie’s choices to see just what goods are in opposition for her and why she can’t come up with a better resolution (and here “she” could refer with equal reason to Maggie or George Eliot, I’d say).

It is a treat to be reading The Mill on the Floss. Much as I love Dickens’s verbal acrobatics and all the other qualities that make Bleak House one of my top 3 Victorian novels, the combination of intelligence, philosophical breadth, social and historical insight, humour, and charity in George Eliot’s narration is enormously stimulating, and her language, so very different from Dickens’s, has its own aesthetic as well as intellectual beauty. Here (because it’s my blog and I can!) is a long and wonderful passage from a chapter with the unpromising title, “A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet.” Bossuet, the notes tell those of us who wouldn’t otherwise know, was a 17th-century French bishop who wrote a history of Protestantism; the unknown variation belongs to Tom and Maggie’s family and “consist[s] in revering whatever was customary and respectable’–it is based on convention and habit, on material and social habits and expectations, rather than on any grand spiritual notions. The Dodsons and Tullivers invite, deserved, and get plenty of satirical treatment and criticism, but, characteristically, George Eliot is concerned to contextualize both their “theory of life” and her own analysis of it, and to prepare us for how their beliefs in turn provide a crucial constraining context for the ardent efforts of her protagonists. I’ve copied the text from this nice searchable e-text.

JOURNEYING down the Rhone on a summer’s day, you have perhaps felt the sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks in certain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose, like an angry, destroying god sweeping down the feeble generations whose breath is in their nostrils’ and making their dwellings a desolation. Strange contrast, you may have thought, between the effect produced on us by these dismal remnants of commonplace houses, which in their best days were but the sign of a sordid life, belonging in all its details to our own vulgar era – and the effect produced by those ruins on the castled Rhine which have crumbled and mellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps, that they seem to have a natural fitness, like the mountain pine: nay, even in the day when they were built they must have had this fitness, as if they had been raised by an earth-born race who had inherited from their mighty parent a sublime instinct of form. And that was a day of romance! If those robber barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres, they had a certain grandeur of the wild beast in them – they were forest boars with tusks tearing and rending, not the ordinary domestic grunter: they represented the demon forces for ever in collision with beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of life: they made a fine contrast in the picture with the wandering minstrel, the soft-lipped princess, the pious recluse and the timid Israelite. That was a time of colour when the sunlight fell on glancing steel and floating banners: a time of adventure and fierce struggle – nay, of living, religious art and religious enthusiasm; for were not cathedrals built in those days and did not great emperors leave their western palaces to die before the infidel strongholds in the sacred east? Therefore it is that these Rhine castles thrill me with a sense of poetry: they belong to the grand historic life of humanity, and raise up for me the vision of an epoch. But these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhone, oppress me with the feeling that human life – very much of it – is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers.

Perhaps something akin to this oppressive feeling may have weighed upon you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the banks of the Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the level of the tragi-comic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and Dodsons – irradiated by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active, self-renouncing faith – moved by none of those wild, uncontrollable passions which create the dark shadows of misery and crime – without that primitive rough simplicity of wants, that hard submissive ill-paid toil, that child-like spelling-out of what nature has written, which gives its poetry to peasant life. Here, one has conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish – surely the most prosaic form of human life: proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build: worldliness without side-dishes. Observing these people narrowly, even when the iron hand of misfortune has shaken them from their unquestioning hold on the world, one sees little trace of religion, still less of a distinctively Christian creed. Their belief in the unseen, so far as it manifests itself at all, seems to be rather of a pagan kind: their moral notions, though held with strong tenacity, seem to have no standard beyond hereditary custom. You could not live among such people; you are stifled for want of an outlet towards something beautiful, great, or noble: you are irritated with these dull men and women, as a kind of population out of keeping with the earth on which they live – with this rich plain where the great river flows for ever onward and links the small pulse of the old English town with the beatings of the world’s mighty heart. A vigorous superstition that lashes its gods or lashes its own back, seems to be more congruous with the mystery of the human lot, than the mental condition of these emmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers.

I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie – how it has acted on young natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the generation before them, to which they have been nevertheless tied by the strongest fibres of their hearts. The suffering, whether of martyr or victim, which belongs to every historical advance of mankind, is represented in this way in every town and by hundreds of obscure hearths: and we need not shrink from this comparison of small things with great; for does not science tell us that its highest striving is after the ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the greatest? In natural science, I have understood, there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation of human life.

Who wouldn’t want to spend more time in this company, at once erudite and ironic, astutely critical and warmly compassionate? The demands are many, but the rewards are too.

This Week in My Classes (November 19, 2008)

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We’ll be working on The Remains of the Day until the end of term in Introduction to Prose and Fiction. Today I highlighted the problem of politics in the novel, looking at the many moments in the novel when Stevens expresses pride in his own indirect contribution to society through his service to Lord Darlington. One of the most comic, yet piognant, examples is the long section on how his finely polished silver “made a small, but significant contribution towards the easing of relations between Lord Halifax and Herr Ribbentrop” during a meeting at Darlington Hall: “Lord Darlington himself suggested that the silver might have been at least a small factor in the change in his guest’s mood that evening, and it is perhaps not absurd to think back to such instances with a glow of satisfaction.” Perhaps. Stevens’s insistence that he reflects on these moments with pride and satisfaction is clearly in tension with his repressed awareness that Lord Darlington’s commitments during this period are problematic, to put it mildly, and thus his own belief in the dignity of his life of loyal service is severely compromised.

We also looked at the links between Stevens’s own political self-effacement–his frequent admissions that international affairs are “over [his] head” or not for “the likes of us”–and the anti-democratic arguments of Lord Darlington and his cronies. In particularly painful scene, Stevens called on, ostensibly to answer a series of questions about current affairs, but really (as he and we quickly see) to demonstrate his own limitations as a political participant. His only response to each question, that he is “unable to be of assistance on this matter,” is wholly in keeping, of course, with his identity as a butler, and thus Ishiguro is able to draw us along from the inadequacies of that role on a personal level to its inadequacies as a model for a democratic citizen. Lord Darlington and his friends use Stevens’s subservience and ignorance as arguments against democracy; as Lord Darlington explains, “Democracy is something for a bygone era. . . Germany and Italy have set their houses in order by acting. . . . Look at Germany and Italy, Stevens. See what strong leadership can do if it’s allowed to act. None of this universal suffrage nonsense there. . . . The man in the street can’t be expected to know enough about politics, economics, world commerce and what have you.” Translated, that is, from a household to a nation, Stevens’s idea of dignity as defined by submission and service to the will and needs of another leads direct to fascist dictatorship.

The proclamations of Harry Smith about “the privileges of being born English” including the right to “express your opinion freely, and vote in your member of parliament or vote him out” set up the grounds for resistance to tyranny and a very different standard of dignity. I’m interested in the relationship of this conflict between repression and self-expression, service and independence, fascism and democratic liberty, and the novel’s narration. On the one hand, the first-person narration is in a way a direct counter to Stevens’s own reluctance to accept his role as the main character in his own life. He has seen himself as a secondary character, telling Miss Kenton,”my vocation will not be fulfilled until I have done all I can to see his lordship through the great tasks he has set himself.” In telling his own story here in the novel, he is forced to see his life a different way, with himself, rather than his master, at the “hub” of things; one result of this shift in perspective is, of course, his realization (or acknowledgment) of his own failures. But he does at least, and at last, speak for himself. Isn’t a fundamental principle of democracy that each voice deserves to be heard, as each vote deserves to be cast? And yet Stevens is hardly a poster child for democracy, precisely because of how badly he has lived his life, how flawed his judgment has been, how unreliable he is. How can we feel good about trusting our wellbeing as a collectivity to individuals as flawed, self-deceived, and ignorant as Stevens’s own voice shows him to be? This is a good conversation starter, anyway, and as a classroom question, it helpfully draws our attention to relationships between the form of the the novel and the ideas it is so clearly but complexly engaged with about what dignity really means and what democracy really requires and entails.

In 19th-Century Fiction, we’ve just started our work on The Mill on the Floss. I always begin a George Eliot ‘unit’ with a survey of her life and philosophical and fictional principles, with an emphasis on her interest in providing a secular alternative to Christianity as a framework for morality, on the relationship she theorizes between realism, sympathy, and morality, and on her interest in and ideas about determinism–so that’s what I did on Monday. Today, though, we will get going on the particulars of this remarkable novel. It’s an enormous shift, stylistically, from Bleak House: the prose is so balanced and philosophicaly, the story so overtly grounded in historical and social analysis, the characters so psychologically complex. I’m loving the humour of it especially, this time. The first couple of chapters, with Mr Tulliver puzzling over how to set Tom up for an education that will serve Mr Tulliver’s desire to get the better of rascally lawyers are hilarious: “I want him to know figures, and write like print, and see into things quick, and know what folks mean, and how to wrap things up in words as aren’t actionable. It’s an uncommon fine thing, that is, . . . when you can let a man know what you think of him without paying for it.” He’s just as unintentionally funny about the great mystery of breeding, which has led him to the puzzling situation of having a daughter who is far more ” ‘cute” (accute) than her brother:

“It’s a pity but what she’d been the lad–she’d ha’ been a match for the lawyers, she would. It’s the wonderful’st thing”–here he lowered his voice–“as I picked the mother because she wasn’t o’er ‘cute–bein’ a good-looking woman too, an’ come of a rare family for managing; but I picked her from her sisters o’ purpose, ’cause she was a bit weak, like; for I wasn’t agoin’ to be told the rights of things by my own fireside. But you see when a man’s got brains himself, there’s no knowing where they’ll run to; an’ a pleasant sort o’ soft woman may go on breeding you stupid lads and ‘cute wenches, till it’s like as if the world was turned topsy-turvy. It’s an uncommon puzzlin’ thing.”

Like his listener Mr Riley, we may find our “gravity [give] way” here! And yet of course there’s nothing really funny about Maggie’s experience of being a “small mistake of nature” in this way, and much of the first few chapters is also devoted to showing her painful encounters with the limits set on her development because she is, as Tom points out, “only a girl.” There are many memorable incidents in the first volume: Maggie smashing the head of her doll, for instance (into which in the past, we’re told, Maggie has often hammered nails to “commemorat[e] . . . crises in Maggie’s nine years of earthly struggle); Maggie trying, and failing, to share the jam puff with Tom in a way that will meet his perverse but rigid standard of what’s right; Maggie chopping off her recalcitrant hair to free herself from the censure of her carping relatives–only to repent; Maggie pushing Lucy in the mud and then running away to the gypsies in hope of finally being “in harmony with circumstances.” Eliot is particularly good at evoking the “bitter sorrows of childhood,” the “strangely perspectiveless conception of life” that gives childhood suffering its special “intensity.” She also writes beautifully about the special relationship we have to the landscapes of our childhood, where the scenery is infused with memories and so speaks to us of who we once were and who we might have been:

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, – if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass – the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows – the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet – what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows – such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep bladed grass today, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years, which still live in us and transform our perception into love.

Falling from Grace

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From JBJ at ‘The Salt-Box‘: “Any time I teach Middlemarch, I can’t help but think that reading other writers is a kind of fall from grace.” I hear you…and I’m sad not to be teaching it in any of my courses this year. Luckily I have a whole graduate seminar on George Eliot to look forward to next year. That course is always a humbling experience, because George Eliot and her novels are so much smarter than I am. But a reader’s reach must exceed her grasp, or what’s this whole business about, after all? JBJ quotes Mr Brooke on pigeon holes (lovely). As small compensation for having no better reason to quote from the novel right now, here’s another nice bit from not much further along, in which Celia shares the news of her sister’s engagement with the inimitable Mrs Cadwallader:

“My dear child, what is this? — this about your sister’s engagement?” said Mrs. Cadwallader.

“She is engaged to marry Mr. Casaubon,” said Celia, resorting, as usual, to the simplest statement of fact, and enjoying this opportunity of speaking to the Rector’s wife alone.

“This is frightful. How long has it been going on?”

“I only knew of it yesterday. They are to be married in six weeks.”

“Well, my dear, I wish you joy of your brother-in-law.”

“I am so sorry for Dorothea.”

“Sorry! It is her doing, I suppose.”

“Yes; she says Mr. Casaubon has a great soul.”

“With all my heart.”

“Oh, Mrs. Cadwallader, I don’t think it can be nice to marry a man with a great soul.”

“Well, my dear, take warning. You know the look of one now; when the next comes and wants to marry you, don’t you accept him. . . . However, Casaubon has money enough; I must do him that justice. As to his blood, I suppose the family quarterings are three cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator rampant.”

George Eliot, comedian.

Adam Bede at The Valve: The Final Post

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(cross-posted)

The final installment of our Adam Bede reading project is up at The Valve. If you’ve been reading along, do come over and leave a comment! Here’s my ‘starter’ post:

First, in case anyone is inspired to go back and read through the posts and comments in sequence, here they are:

Was Adam Bede the best choice for a project like this? I don’t know, but clearly some people enjoyed it, or at least persevered with it, and probably we all know things we didn’t know before, whether about George Eliot, Dutch painting, fanfic, or just ourselves as readers. I don’t have any sense of how many people were reading along but not commenting. If there are any of you still lurking out there, I hope you’ll take this opportunity to say a few words about you and your experience of reading Adam Bede this summer. I’m sure the people who have been commenting all along don’t need any special prompting from me to add their own last words!

A thumbnail version of my own reaction on this rereading of the novel is that it’s an extraordinary first book. (I know: Scenes of Clerical Life was her first published fiction, but it’s a different kind of thing.) My initial inability to read it without making mental connections and comparisons to her later work came to confirm for me that she learned how to do, better, many of the things she is trying to do here, novelistically and artistically as well as philosophically and dramatically. But she could already do remarkable things in all of these categories, from passages of memorable wisdom and poignancy in the intrusive narration to scenes of striking pathos and suspense, such as Hetty’s forlorn pilgrimage. If Adam is a bit of a stump (though arguably better, as a hunk, than Felix Holt a couple of novels later), he is excellent practice for Caleb Garth; Mr Irwine fumbles the ball Mr Farebrother will pick up and run with; Dorothea is a thoroughly secularized saint–but Mrs Poyser is as good as a Dickens character, and I mean that without irony, someone who livens up your imagination from having lived in it for a while. The overall structure seems beautifully balanced, better than The Mill on the Floss (heavily weighted, GE admitted, towards the childhood scenes and so rushed through to the end), and the set pieces such as the birthday feast work better for me for my having considered them (like the harvest supper at the end) in light of the painterly analogies explored in Yeazell’s book. But here my own limitations and preoccupations are showing: I’m thinking about the novel in the context of GE’s other novels, and there are lots of other ways we could go.

In closing, then, here’s my favourite passage from the last section of the novel. I think it captures something that really struck me this time about the underlying tone of the story, in which nostalgia for the past is charged with mourning (it’s the past, after all, and not to be recovered) but at the same time counteracted with energy for a new life richer with meaning and sympathy because of that history, just as Adam’s love for Dinah is stronger, not weaker, because of their shared memories of Hetty. We can’t really long for the past because we are no longer the same people:

It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it–if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy–the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.

And, a bit later on,

The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength: we can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy, than a painter or musician can wish to return to his cruder manner, or a philosopher to his less complete formula.

As someone who has a few times this summer felt strongly inclined to “hide her eyes in selfish complaining” (Middlemarch Ch. 80), I can at least aspire to this condition of mental growth and “added strength.” It’s not what everyone reads for (not me either, not all the time), but it’s one good thing to take away an idea about how the bad and the good in one’s life might come together to make one a more sympathetic person.

Summer Reading Project: Adam Bede (Chapters 36-48)

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

This week’s installment of our summer reading project at The Valve brings us to the emotional and moral climax of Adam Bede. This is a section full of pathos, suspense, and melodrama as we follow Hetty on her journeys in hope and despair, as we see the painful process by which Adam and our other friends at Hayslope are brought into knowledge and suffering by “the terrible illumination which the present sheds back upon the past,” and as we go with Dinah into Hetty’s dark cell. How far do the lessons we have been offered about sympathy and forgiveness move us past the horror of this moment:

‘I hadn’t got far out of the road into one of the open places, before I heard a strange cry. I thought it didn’t come from any animal I knew, but I wasn’t for stopping to look about just then. But it went on, and seemed so strange to me in that place, I couldn’t help stopping to look. . . . And I looked about among them, but could find nothing; and at last the cry stopped. So I was for giving it up, and I went on about my business. But when I came back the same way pretty nigh an hour after, I couldn’t help laying down my stakes to have another look. And just as I was stooping and laying down the stakes, I saw something odd and round and whitish lying on the ground under a nut-bush by the side of me. And I stooped down on hands and knees to pick it up. And I saw it was a little baby’s hand.’

How far, also, is the dramatic turn of events at the end of Chapter XLVII a break from the novel’s program of realism? I’m also interested in Bartle Massey’s role in this section as well as Mr. Irwine’s, and in the structural symmetries of many of the scenes here to earlier ones. As always, everyone is welcome to pitch in on these or any other topics as the comments thread unfolds at The Valve.