Memory and history in George Eliot: transfiguring the past

Memory and History in George Eliot Transfiguring the Past

Hao Li

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Memory and History in George Eliot

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

This page intentionally left blank

Transfiguring the Past Hao Li Assistant Professor of English University of Toronto

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Memory and History in George Eliot

First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–67595–9 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–22834–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Li, Hao, 1960– Memory and history in George Eliot : transfiguring the past / Hao Li. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–22834–1 (cloth) 1. Eliot, George, 1819–1880—Knowledge—History. 2. Literature and history— England—History—19th century. 3. Historical fiction, English—History and criticism. 4. Autobiographical memory in literature. 5. History in literature. 6. Memory in literature. I. Title. PR4692.H5 L5 1999 823'.8—dc21 99–046744 © Hao Li 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

9 8 08 07

7 06

6 05

5 04

4 03

3 02

2 01

1 00

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

To my parents

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

This page intentionally left blank

Contents viii

Note on Editions, Abbreviations, References and Italics List of Abbreviations

xii

Introduction: Memory, History and George Eliot 1

xi

1

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’: Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede

15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency in The Lifted Veil, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner

40

The Moment in History: The Temporal Sense of Emotional Development in Romola

69

4

Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

97

5

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

121

6

National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

150

2 3

Epilogue: Historical Consciousness and the Intellectual

187

Notes

196

Index

220

vii

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Acknowledgements

To acknowledge here the debt I have accumulated during the writing of this book I can in no way express the deep gratitude I feel towards those who have helped and supported me. My greatest debt is to Dr Stefan Collini of the University of Cambridge, who guided and supported my work from the beginning and inspired me with his example of dedication and serious understanding. With characteristic thoughtfulness and sharp insight, he also commented on the final version of this manuscript. I am also deeply indebted to Professor Dame Gillian Beer for suggesting this fascinating topic in the first place and for following up with invaluable advice and encouragement. Over the years, the inspiration of both of them has always been matched by their unfailing support. Without their help, understanding, and generosity, I would never have been able to finish the book, let alone publish it. I only wish I could have written a book more worthy of their kindness and example. I am also very grateful to Professor Rosemary Ashton, who made valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this work, parts of which have been incorporated here. Her advice has greatl helped to refocus my argument; to Professors Jonathan Hart and Gary Kelly for urging me to publish the manuscript and for their professional advice; and to Professors W. David Shaw and Alan Bewell for taking time from their busy schedules to read the entire manuscript at its final stage, offering not only encouragement and reassurance but also incisive advice and suggestions. Thanks are also due to the following friends, teachers, and colleagues who have helped me more than they realize by commenting on individual chapters or giving me other help and encouragement: Dr Mary Hamer, Professors John Baird, John Beer, Susan Hamilton, John Hunter, Linda Hutcheon, Jill Matus, Juliet McMaster, Rowland McMaster, Shirley Neuman, Ted Pitcher, Will Robins, Sara Stambaugh, Chris Wiesenthal, and Arlette Zinck; thanks, in particular, to Professor Ted Bishop, who insisting on keeping his promise, and read one of the chapters with good humour even while he was confined in a body cast following an accident. The work of many George Eliot scholars has been and continues to be of immense value. My references in the notes section represent only an inadequate indication of my indebtedness to them. viii

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Acknowledgements

ix

Charmian Hearne has been the most supportive editor an author can hope for. I benefited enormously from her faith in the project, her understanding and thoughtfulness. I would also like to thank the anonymous reader of Macmillan for timely criticisms and suggestions; Keith Povey for carefully preparing the manuscript for publication; Jean Richardson and Carolyn Lee, who assisted my research during 1996–7, for speedy help; the students of my graduate seminar at the University of Toronto on memory and history in Victorian literature for their intellectual stimulation; and the staff of the English Faculty Library at Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Dr Williams’s Library in London, The New York Public Library, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, for making my visits enjoyable and fruitful. The staff at the Inter-Library Loans Department, Robarts Library, University of Toronto, have been most obliging, meeting my voluminous requests for nineteenth-century sources with good spirits and speedy searches over North America and Britain. I am grateful to Jonathan Ouvry, great-great-grandson of George Henry Lewes, and holder of the George Eliot copyright, for kind permission to reproduce and quote from manuscript materials of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes; and to Professor Simon During for allowing me to quote from his unpublished doctoral dissertation. I would also like to thank the curators and trustees of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and of the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, for permissions to consult and quote from their manuscript holdings; and Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce excerpts from the Clarendon Edition of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Romola and Scenes of Clerical Life.* Permission is also granted by the Director of Dr Williams’s Library in London on behalf of the Trustees to quote from George Eliot’s marginalia from books in the George Henry Lewes Library owned by Dr Williams’s Trust. The writing of this book has been financially supported at various stages by the following institutions and foundations: Trinity College, Cambridge; Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University; Chancellor’s Fund, University of Cambridge; Committee of ViceChancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom; the Izaak Walton Killam Foundation; the University of Alberta; and the Connaught Fund, University of Toronto. These supports are here gratefully acknowledged.

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

In dedicating this book to my parents, I thank them for first introducing me to literature and then helping me, through their own example, to understand the humility and gratification of criticism and scholarship. If this book has any merit at all, it is in large measure due to the generosity and support of all these people and institutions; I, of course, am entirely responsible for the errors and inadequacies that remain. Hao Li *The author and publishers are grateful to Oxford University Press for permis-

sion to reproduce selections as indicated from the following titles from The Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot: Scenes of Clerical Life, edited by Thomas A. Noble (1985) © Thomas A. Noble 1985. Reprinted from George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, edited by Thomas A. Noble (Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot, 1985) by permission of Oxford University Press. The Mill on the Floss, edited by Gordon S. Haight (1980) © Oxford University Press 1980. Reprinted from George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, edited by Gordon S. Haight (Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot, 1980) by permission of Oxford University Press. Romala, edited by Andrew Brown (1993) © Andrew Brown 1993. Reprinted from George Eliot, Romala, edited by Andew Brown (Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot, 1993) by permission of Oxford University Press. Felix Holt, The Radical, edited by Fred C. Thompson (1980) © Fred C. Thomson 1980. Reprinted from George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical, edited by Fred C. Thomson (Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot, 1980) by permission of Oxford University Press. Middlemarch, edited by David Carroll (1986) © Oxford University Press 1986. Reprinted from George Eliot, Middlemarch, edited by David Carroll (Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot,1986) by permission of Oxford University Press. Daniel Deronda, edited by Graham Handley (1984) © Oxford University Press 1984. Reprinted from George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, edited by Graham Handley (Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot, 1984) by permission of Oxford University Press.

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

x

1

2

3

4

5

All references to George Eliot’s novels and stories are to the Clarendon Edition. For those works where this edition is not available, the Cabinet Edition is used instead. For details, see the List of Abbreviations. All references to George Eliot’s novels and stories are given in brackets in the text, and consist of abbreviated titles of individual works, followed by numbers of book, chapter and page which are separated by colons. Where only two figures appear, they denote the numbers of chapter and page, except in the case of The Spanish Gypsy, where they denote the numbers of book and page. References to certain works by George Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, Auguste Comte, George Henry Lewes and Herbert Spencer are also given in brackets in the text, and consist of abbreviated titles of individual works, the volume number where applicable, and the page number. For George Eliot’s holograph notebook Miscellanies, folio numbers are used instead. Except for those titles which appear in the List of Abbreviations, full details of publication for books and articles cited will be given at their first appearance in this book, and subsequently given only in a short form. All italics in quotations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

xi

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Note on Editions, Abbreviations, References and Italics

List of Abbreviations George Eliot, Adam Bede, Cabinet Edition, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London, [1878]). ‘Address’ George Eliot, ‘Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt’, as ‘Appendix C’, in Felix Holt, the Radical, edited by Fred C. Thomson, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1980), pp. 412–22. ‘Barton’ George Eliot, ‘Amos Barton’, in Scenes of Clerical Life, edited by Thomas A. Noble, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1985), pp. 5–72. CP George Eliot, Collected Poems, edited with an introduction by Lucien Jenkins (London, 1989). Cross George Eliot, George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, arranged and edited by J. W. Cross, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London, 1885). DD George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, edited by Graham Handley, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1984). E George Eliot, Essays of George Eliot, edited by Thomas Pinney (London, 1963). EC Auguste Comte, The Essential Comte, Selected from Cours de Philosophie Positive by Auguste Comte, edited and with an introduction by Stanislav Andreski, translated and annotated by Margaret Clarke (London, 1974). FC George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, First Series: The Foundations of a Creed, 2 vols (London, 1874–75). FH George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical, edited by Fred C. Thomson, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1980). GEN George Eliot, Some George Eliot Notebooks: An Edition of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library’s George Eliot Holograph Notebooks, MSS 707, 708, 709, 710, 711, edited by William Baker, 4 vols (Salzburg, 1976–85). ‘GL’ George Eliot, ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’, in Scenes of Clerical Life, edited by Thomas A. Noble, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1985), pp. 73–187. ITS George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Cabinet Edition (Edinburgh and London, [1880]). ‘JR’ George Eliot, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, in Scenes of Clerical Life, edited by Thomas A. Noble, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1985), pp. 189–334. xii

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

AB

L LV

M MF Misc

OED PLM3

PP PPAC

R SG

SM

SP

SPP

WTC

xiii

George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, edited by Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, 1954–78). George Eliot, The Lifted Veil, in Silas Marner, The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob, Cabinet Edition (Edinburgh and London, [1878]), pp. 275–341. George Eliot, Middlemarch, edited by David Carroll, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1986). George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, edited by Gordon S. Haight, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1980). George Eliot, Miscellanies, holograph notebook, Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. The Oxford English Dictionary, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 20 vols, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1989). George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series (Continued), Problem the Second: Mind as a Function of the Organism; Problem the Third: The Sphere of Sense and Logic of Feeling; Problem the Fourth: The Sphere of Intellect and the Logic of Signs (London, 1879). Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, 2nd edn (1855; London and Edinburgh, 1870–2). Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau, 2 vols (London, 1853). George Eliot, Romola, edited by Andrew Brown, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1993). George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy, in Collected Poems, edited with an introduction by Lucien Jenkins (London, 1989), pp. 201–456. George Eliot, Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, in Silas Marner, The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob, Cabinet Edition (Edinburgh and London, [1878]), pp. 1–273. George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, Problem the First: The Study of Psychology: Its Object, Scope and Method (London, 1879). Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity, or Treatise on Sociology, Instituting the Religion of Humanity, translated by J. H. Bridges et al., 4 vols (London, 1875–77). Thomas Carlyle, The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition, edited by Henry Duff Traill, 30 vols (London, 1896–9).

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

List of Abbreviations

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

This page intentionally left blank

Clio was figured by the ancients as the eldest daughter of Memory, and chief of the Muses; which dignity, whether we regard the essential qualities of her art, or its practice and acceptance among men, we shall still find to have been fitly bestowed. (Thomas Carlyle, ‘On History’, WTC, XXVII, 83) In Chapter 18 of Adam Bede, the narrator describes Adam Bede’s thoughts during the church service and highlights how ‘a certain consciousness of our entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen sensibility’. To justify such a blending, the narrator points out that ‘the secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past’ (AB, 18:300). In her novels and other writings, George Eliot returns time and again to this theme of the formation of relations in time – ‘a continual stream of rhythmic memories’ (MF, 4:3:256) – but it is the predominant sense of the collective that from the very beginning defines the meaning of these memories. The collective scope is never confined to the communities imagined in the fictional works; it always has implications for the society in which Eliot herself was historically situated. This study explores ‘memory’ in the work of George Eliot primarily as communal memory, though personal memory is treated as a related issue. ‘Communal memory’ here means forms, both fictional and real, of collective mentality and moral consciousness, shared feelings, manners, rituals, customs as well as verbal expressions, which have evolved over generations. They constitute the deep-running continuity of human life. To individual communal members, they can be forms of knowledge both from and 1

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Introduction: Memory, History and George Eliot

Memory, History and George Eliot

of the past. To understand the term ‘communal memory’ in this way is not to deny or underestimate the importance or relevance of personal contributions, but to recognize that communal memories are not reducible to a mere sum total of personal memories. The term ‘collective memory’ is sometimes used to emphasize the aggregating nature of communal memory. Communal memory is, in many ways, fundamental to Eliot’s understanding of the amenability of the past. For her, while our connection with the past may provide a solid basis for the present, that connection is formed mostly by way of memory. Memory, both as process and result, thus becomes one of the pivotal means by which a perception of the past can be effected and the past can help to shape an understanding of the present. She valued society and tradition but also wanted to change them. Communal memory is for her more a form of tradition full of tensions and conflicts than an a priori morally privileged and unified inheritance. Her ambivalence and scepticism underlie, in varying degrees, all her stories and novels. While it is never just, in Carlyle’s words, ‘the true fountain of knowledge’ (‘On History’, WTC, XXVII, 89), or an example for ‘illustrating our own poor Century’ (Past and Present, WTC, X, 39), communal memory both maintains historical continuity and generates from within the need for reform. It helps to determine Eliot’s own interpretation of history, a sense of history which is also the focus of this study. The aim of this study is thus not to investigate the specific forms of communal memory per se, but to understand her conception of the mechanisms and functions of such a memory by focusing on its relation to history. In her novels and stories, communal memory often takes the form of collective knowledge carried over from previous generations. Such knowledge may include ‘conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish’. The characters’ ‘moral notions, though held with strong tenacity, seem to have no standard beyond hereditary custom’ (MF, 4:1:238). Eliot understood this condition to be the ‘natural history’ of her characters’ consciousness. ‘[These] beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life’ (R, 36:329). Her interest moved gradually from investigating how this hereditary force acts upon the lives of individuals to exploring how reform can be initiated against such determinism. In spite of the fact that individual characters have been ‘tied by the strongest fibres of their hearts’, she was interested in anticipating the direction in which they would react ‘in the onward

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

2

3

tendency of human things’ (MF, 4:1:238). This notion of communal memory needs to be distinguished from the personal memory of individual characters. We may regard personal memory as voluntary or involuntary individual recollection, and communal memory as a framework of knowledge and presupposition consciously or often unconsciously inherited and shared. There has been much critical discussion on memory in Eliot, primarily as an personal, rather than a collective, notion. Personal memory is no doubt an important aspect in her representation of memory, but it is presented largely to reveal an individual’s relations to a communal way of life and thus needs to be understood essentially in terms of its interactions with communal memory. If we focus primarily on personal memory, we may overlook her emphasis on communal memory as shaping and giving meaning to personal memory. Her representation of memory is concerned with a complex of relations. While personal experience cannot but come under the pervasive regulatory effect of communal memory, personal memory is not identical with communal memory. Maggie Tulliver, for example, may still have recollections that are not completely filtered through the representation of her community. This makes it possible for an individual to think differently about, or initiate the reform of, a specific collective tradition. On the other hand, communal memory itself does not result essentially from the lived experience of a single generation. It may have its own raison d’être, its own mysterious form of existence, like the spirit of the legendary St Ogg that perpetually walks the streets in town. The formation of communal memory may differ substantially from that of personal memory; the notion of communal memory thus ought to be understood both within and without the realm of personal memory. This memory is different from the Jungian concept of the ‘Collective Unconscious’. While it does involve a subconscious and perhaps unconscious inheritance of moral sentiments, communal memory does not exclude the characters’ conscious awareness of social relations and practices that help both to form and sustain that memory; nor does it write off any enthusiastic or wilful efforts within a community to make its members aware of the shared mentalities, the ultimate political expression of such efforts being nationalism.1 Communal memory can be enriched and modified by the particular experiences of individual members, which intimate an interaction between the Jungian concepts of the ‘Collective Unconscious’ and the ‘Personal Unconscious’.2 Fundamental to Eliot’s conception is the

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Memory, History and George Eliot

Memory, History and George Eliot

belief that communal memory in a broader sense is capable of producing a secular form of religion – the Religion of Humanity. To subsume such a belief under the Jungian term will undoubtedly limit and alter the meaning of communal memory in Eliot. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the historical dimensions of communal memory, not the Jungian archetypes that are basically ahistorical.3 To use the Jungian term would, therefore, diminish the nineteenthcentury connotation of the idea of memory, memory either as a psychological concept or as an emotional medium that helps to cultivate moral confidence so as to mitigate the troubling effects of industrialization on Victorian society. Of course, one might argue that communal memory is a form of historical consciousness and that, in terms of approach, to separate them too neatly will overcomplicate the issue. Communal memory is, undoubtedly, closely connected to a sense of history, but to take it as mere historical sense will obscure the meaning of memory. The very process of ‘remembering’ essential to the notion of communal memory occurs in the present and as the present, with the past being implied or incorporated. A sense of history, on the other hand, indicates an understanding of the past with a view to its significance for the present. The subjects of a historical past are, as Maurice Halbwachs reminded us long ago, usually people indirectly related to those who maintain a sense of history. Therefore, a sense of history may suggest a more distanced and objective perspective about the past than communal memory does. It is thus possible to differentiate between a historical consciousness that sometimes tends to be neutralized and ‘official’ and a form of communal memory that can be intensely personal and emotional.4 Furthermore, the fictional forms of the characters’ memory are conditioned by Eliot’s own attitude towards the past, which evokes a backward-looking perspective shared by many thinkers contemporaneous with her. The contextual references in this study to these thinkers’ interest in history are another reason why communal memory is not identical with historical consciousness. The term ‘historical consciousness’ may thus highlight their awareness of the evolutionary nature of communal memory and the implications that Eliot’s representation of memory may have for her contemporary readers. On the other hand, different as they are, to separate communal memory and historical consciousness too neatly is to overlook the interrelations between them. To invoke historical consciousness here is an imperative approach, for communal memory is so intrinsically related to historical consciousness that without the

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

4

5

latter the former would have nothing to bear upon. Thus, instead of treating communal memory and historical consciousness as two separate themes, this study focuses on the symbiotic relationship between them. Eliot’s novels and stories offer us a wonderful gallery where the subtle intricacies and concatenations of this relationship are displayed with full cogency. The issues dealt with extensively in these works appeal to us with their intense modernity: for example, the relations between memory as events and as narrative; the dialectics of memory and oblivion; the power of memory as the conscious, subconscious and unconscious; the temporal sense of memory in relation to the historical meaning of memory; the determining effect of group mentality on the reform of such a mentality; the historicity of mythologizing modern events; the relations between an intellectual and his or her community; memory and the formation of personal, communal and national identities. Although I draw upon the larger intellectual context by using writings of Eliot’s contemporaries, my discussion is not strictly contextual or historical as such. Instead of trying to restore her to some now supposedly forgotten or neglected context, I focus on particular themes in her novels and stories and on their dialectical connections and tensions. To support such thematic discussions, I have not refrained from using, eclectically for the most part, nineteenthcentury sources, including scientific writings and archival materials; but above all I use her novels and stories as the main sources of my discussion. The close readings and critical analyses offered here are primarily meant to illustrate certain possibilities in her works. I make no claim to completeness in my account of her views, nor to a critique of her intellectual development per se, but aim for a rereading of her novels and stories and, through this, a reappraisal of her understanding of the dialectics of memory and history in the light of my chosen themes. A full-scale critique would no doubt have given the structure of this study a more systematic appearance, but it may also have unintentionally played down the specific difficulties that she encountered in writing. In my view, Eliot does not merely offer metaphorical ideas of socio-historical conditions. The language of her novels and stories, precisely because it is fictional, offers us ideas for a more adequate comprehension of memory and history. For this reason, to trace the development of her conception becomes a matter of clarifying thoughts which were considered and transformed within her own field of language. My approach is thus consciously eclectic. I have found very helpful general works by such writers as Michael

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Memory, History and George Eliot

Memory, History and George Eliot

Oakeshott, Paul Ricoeur, Richard Terdiman, Mary Warnock and Hayden White, but I do not base my approach essentially on these works. For nineteenth-century sources, I concentrate on several thinkers whose approaches to communal memory, like that of Eliot, reflect the ‘romantic-historical and the positivist approaches to society’.5 Their epistemological and philosophical writings explore how human feelings can become an important source of knowledge and a possible substitute for Christian faith. The ‘positivist’ nature of Eliot’s thinking has been widely examined in relation to the writings of Auguste Comte, French philosopher, of George Henry Lewes, Victorian ‘man of letters’ and Eliot’s companion, and of Herbert Spencer, philosopher and Eliot’s friend.6 Yet the relevance of their theories of communal memory has not been sufficiently explored. More importantly, to take these ‘scientists’ as the only contextual sources would impoverish the complexity of Eliot’s conception, for she wrote also within the ‘romantic-historical’ tradition and made significant contributions to it. This second tradition is, most typically, though not exclusively, illustrated by Carlyle’s historical imagination in general and his conception of memory as history in particular. This tradition is akin to Wordsworth’s conception of affective memory, which had a lifelong influence on Eliot, an influence that was refocused, if not reshaped, in her by a fusion of the transcendental meaning of the collective and the immediacy of specific social and intellectual concerns. It is important to evoke this second tradition in order to gauge the full implications of her historical consciousness. Reading her novels and stories through the ideas and categories of analysis belonging to both traditions will reveal how their coexistence and tension have caused her many conceptual difficulties. It is only within the context of both Carlyle and the ‘scientists’ that she can be seen to have cherished at once a ‘scientific’ and a transcendental view towards life. It is highly necessary, therefore, to read her within a less restrictive context in which the above two strands of thought are deliberately brought into dialectical tension and mutual illumination. The ‘romantic-historical’ tradition is represented, among others, by the young Carlyle and his early radicalism. His writings of this stage aim to establish history as a secular religion against the ‘inorganic’ and ‘pulpy’ ‘Industrial Ages’ (Past and Present, WTC, X, 249). What he saw as the transcendental meaning in historical events ‘rouses in others’, observed Eliot in her essay on Carlyle, ‘the activities that must issue in discovery’ (E, 213). His form of idealism, particularly that in Sartor Resartus, gave a whole generation a sense of secularized hope.7

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

6

7

What Eliot shared with Carlyle was, in A. J. O. Cockshut’s words, the aspiration to ‘separate the feelings, attitudes and duties which religion had fostered from the doctrines which it preached’. Yet she did not accept his way of seeing everything as the manifestation of the absolute and the divine. She had maintained, following Feuerbach and the biblical critics, that ‘the feelings were the original stuff of religious experience, and the doctrines, including belief in God, had followed from the feelings’.8 The influence of German biblical criticism is germane to this study, particularly Feuerbach’s view that human consciousness is necessarily a form of species consciousness. Existing criticism on this subject is highly detailed and sophisticated and I shall make use of these studies where necessary.9 The developmental hypothesis of the German critics concerning the origin and essence of religion had a long-term impact on Eliot’s understanding of the meaning of history. And here it is precisely where the definition of history and the historiographical approach represented by, among others, Carlyle and the nineteenth-century historian J. R. Green may also be brought in as part of the context.10 To evoke Green may seem arbitrary and somewhat anachronistic, for his major work, A Short History of the English People, was not published until 1874 when Eliot had completed most of her novels. However, the intellectual vogue that he helped to create and, in particular, the mode of historical imagination that he represented were part of the context of her works. In fact, she was acquainted with Green’s Short History and History of the English People,11 but in spite of the similarity in historical imagination between Eliot and Green, it would be misleading to focus on their actual historical connection. Carlyle’s natural supernaturalism is compounded with an ‘essentially cyclic and also discontinuous conception’ of history.12 He and Green, among others, clearly showed a historiographical interest in the natural mode of common life. Their imaginative style of writing tends to bring out the emotional, religious and more traditional aspects of collective life. For both of them, to interpret history is to recognize its implications for the present. Similarly, the historical past in Eliot’s novels and stories is, to borrow Michael Oakeshott’s formulation, not just ‘a recollected or a consulted past’, but almost always ‘an historically understood past’.13 Yet unlike Carlyle who used the past mainly as a ready standard against which to judge contemporary society, Eliot often evoked the past in order to diagnose and understand the present. On the other hand, she also shared his sensitivity to the natural sequence of remembering and forgetting that consti-

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Memory, History and George Eliot

Memory, History and George Eliot

tutes the sequence of history. If history consists in the dialectical relations between continuity and discontinuity, then memory and oblivion are its interpretative means. She recognized the aim of his imaginative writing as ‘[awaking] men from their indifference to the right and the wrong’ (E, 213). While her moral conception is fundamentally intuitional, it has an empirical basis informed by the evolutionary theories of Lewes, Comte and Spencer.14 ‘Comte’s model of social development’, as Sally Shuttleworth has pointed out, ‘was one which sustained both a psychological theory of determinism and a moral theory of historical allegiance’.15 William Myers has further observed, ‘if man’s moral sensibilities are closely related to his primitive life’, and ‘if the emotions themselves are inextricably involved in the reactions and sensations of the body, then simple, primordial experiences of mind and body have immense moral importance’.16 Comte’s theory appealed to Eliot to the extent that it fell in line with her early influence of Evangelicalism, with the belief that human impulses are guided ‘by the intellect of human beings who have gone before them’ (E, 166). The Comtean Religion of Humanity emphasized the necessity of a spiritual power in society, which Comte did not find all critical philosophers ready to accept. Sympathy as a form of emotional development ought to be able to replace the function of the Christian spirit. The sense of continuity in such a ‘religion’, particularly in Comte’s conception of altruism as the development of human feelings, may help us to clarify Eliot’s understanding of the moral significance of communal memory. In this respect it is important to note that his theory of the nature of affective states is just as important as his much better-known analysis of the three stages of social evolution. Her acceptance of these theories was not unqualified; she often tried, wherever necessary, to make modifications. To bring Lewes’s theories of memory into our discussion of Eliot can be a most intricate task. While his theories are confirmed time and again in Eliot’s works, a close reading of these works often yields fine distinctions between their understandings of affective memory. The elements of agreement in their works are most valuable as they demonstrate significant convergences and overlaps in their thinking, yet their differences are just as important. It would be misleading, of course, to conflate their interests and views. Lewes based his psychological theories on both instinct and experience and recognized the importance of the unconscious, unlike Comte who based his theory of mind only on human instinct.17 His psychological theories attempt to

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

8

9

integrate two preexistent traditions: metaphysical speculations on sensation and associationism by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British philosophers and physiological psychology which became influential in the early and mid-nineteenth century. But he was able to move beyond them in his organicist, anti-atomist approach. Lewes’s own contribution is to find an evolutionary basis in this complex of ideas about mind and body. His theory of memory has three principles. First, he highlighted the historical factor in the transmission and inheritance of collective habits and traditions, what might be called, in Oakeshott’s words, ‘an encapsulated past’. The relation of these inherited feelings to the present ‘does not in any way depend upon its being recollected’.18 Second, he specified the process in which residua of experience are organized into intuitions and perceptions. On any ‘fresh excitation the past feelings are revivable’ and thus lead to the formation of experiences (SP, 34). In common with James Mill and Herbert Spencer, he saw a difference between a sensation in the past and the awareness or recollection of such a sensation, though, unlike James Mill who saw memory as only ‘an image of the sensation’, Lewes differentiated the stages of how sensation leads to consciousness and thought.19 These theories continue to advance the tradition of philosophical accounts of recollection by John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and David Hartley, among others,20 especially since the Lockean notion of association already includes self-reflection or self-interpretation.21 The third emphasis in Lewes’s theory was on the social factor in the development of human faculties and on the relationship between different elements in the interpretation of experience (SP, 32). He was aware of the limits of the introspective method. ‘Mind’ and ‘life’ could not be separated. Memory consists in both sentient ‘Mechanism’ and ‘Experience’ (SP, 32) whose interactions are designed to ‘reconcile the à priori intuitional with the experiential theory’ (SP, 144). His adaptational understanding of ‘the General Mind’ (SP, 159) is substantiated by his notions of ‘Memory’, ‘residua’ and the ‘field of personal experience’ (PLM3, 113, 115, 116; original emphases). He saw in human relations the essence of communal memory. Ideas like these are broached and tested in Eliot’s novels and stories. Human experience was a historical factor in Spencer’s earlier ideas. In this, he ‘effectively merged an empiricist account of knowledge with evolutionary theory’.22 Spencer saw the physiological as a necessary basis of psychology and scientific psychology as significant in interpreting social phenomena. Particularly relevant to this study are

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Memory, History and George Eliot

Memory, History and George Eliot

his theories of the instinctive nature of moral sentiment and of the inheritance of moral experience. Regarding the ‘characteristics which could be inherited’, his Lamarckianism is much less restrictive than the theory of Alexander Bain23 and forms a meaningful point of reference for similar concerns in Eliot. In addition, his intention to compound and reconcile rational and determining laws with traditional values of human experience also characterizes Eliot’s basic position. ‘Scientists’ like Spencer and Lewes contributed significantly to the general interest of their time in a variety of evolutionary theories. Together with Charles Darwin, they helped to place an unprecedented emphasis on the concept of the species and the sense of recapitulation.24 Their concern with the nature and function of memory becomes not just a philosophical but a social, psychological, and historical quest. The study of the inner world and affective memory was Eliot’s paramount concern, whose lineage can be more immediately traced back to Wordsworth, among others. The subjective act of the mind always preoccupied her and was frequently explored for its role in the formation of a sense of self. Thus in trying to reconcile the need for free will and her belief in scientific laws, Eliot resembles neither H. T. Buckle, the nineteenth-century British historian, who saw in history the abstract manifestations of universal laws, nor Carlyle, who saw history as divine embodiment. While she believed that the prediction of history could be based on knowledge of the past, she also maintained that the interiority of the human mind might not always be accessible to a general study of historical laws. For her, historical phenomena could not always be adequately accounted for. This results in her intense interest in mystery and prevision, clearly evident in her short story The Lifted Veil. ‘Our angel Reason’ has its limits and therefore needs to be supplemented by ‘Memory’ (SG, 2:348). Nevertheless, Eliot’s moral commitment, which far surpasses that of ‘scientists’ such as Lewes, makes memory into a special kind of knowledge, a knowledge which, as Mary Warnock speaks of Wittgenstein’s similar notion, has ‘a particular meaning or sense of its own’. It is a memory that ‘refers to the past … and we interpret it as containing that reference’.25 The two strands of thought outlined above do not necessarily contradict each other in every way. They ought to be taken, in J. S. Mill’s words, as ‘the two systems of concentric circles’ for what they share.26 Yet it is also true that the diverse and sometimes inconsistent perspectives that they provide intimate a ‘co-habitation’ that is far from harmonious. These strands of thought, judged by definitions

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

10

11

commonly accepted today, seem to belong to several disciplines. The cross-disciplinary nature of this study is necessary, since in the period under discussion the demarcation between history, sociology, moral philosophy and psychology was not as distinct or well-defined as it is now.27 Only a ‘combined’ approach can help to bring out the complexity of Eliot’s intellectual ‘milieu’. Most of the figures mentioned had a direct or indirect influence on her intellectual formation; Lewes and Spencer had close relationships with her. Yet it would be misleading to assume that these relationships necessarily establish actual historical ‘influence’. It might also be objected that Lewes’s theories seem to have been backdated to an earlier time for reconstructing an intellectual context.28 Yet Lewes himself indicated that he had begun to investigate the ‘physiological mechanism of Feeling and Thought’ in 1862 (FC, I, vi). Many of the ideas expressed in his Study of Psychology were already present in his Physiology of Common Life published in 1859–60, a period during which Eliot’s early fictional works were published. Given the fact that over the next twelve years or so his theories were developed while he was living with Eliot, references to these theories should not pose problems to our sense of chronology. The use of Lewes’s theory of memory in this study is also supported by the fact that the Third Series of his Problems of Life and Mind, in which such theories are most fully developed, was edited and completed by Eliot after his death on the basis of his notes.29 I have chosen a thematic structure for this study, but I have also tried generally to follow the chronology of Eliot’s writings, so as to bring out in each chapter, as much as possible, the close connection between the theme and form of each novel or story. Occasionally I use the terms ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ to help to distinguish two perceptible stages of George Eliot’s writing. I am borrowing Ferdinand Tönnies’s terminology only, not his theories of society. The two terms are used to make a loose distinction between traditional and modern aspects of social life and thus to serve heuristic functions.30 The term ‘Gemeinschaft novels’ is applied loosely to the earlier works: Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner; and the term ‘Gesellschaft novels’ to the later novels: Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. The nature of human relations in these works, particularly the impersonal, contractual and individual relations in some of the second group, will, I believe, support such a classification.31 This is not to suggest, though, that communal memory does not constitute a focus of attention in the ‘Gesellschaft

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Memory, History and George Eliot

Memory, History and George Eliot

novels’. The ‘Gemeinschaft novels’ offer Eliot’s initial positions across the diverse earlier patterns of her conception. Starting from Romola, the more traditional way of communal life gives way to the ‘social’ mode, and this changes the framework in which communal memory is explored and reflected on. The earlier works demonstrate an intense interest in the terms and issues central to Eliot’s conception of memory and to the argument of this study: ‘feeling’, ‘environment’, ‘inheritance’, and so on. Her fictional exploration reveals a dialectical relationship between memory as a narrative of interpretation and invention and memory with its ‘immovable roots’ in the past. The complexity of her interest in these two aspects lies, however, in her ambiguous answer to the general questions of how to take a communal past as a prehistory to the present, and of how to preserve this heritage in a spiritually disinherited age. These works intimate an ambivalent attempt both to endow her characters’ ‘environment’ with a supportive role and to question the validity of this environment as a source of ‘self’ as its strong power may constrain and paralyse the moral agency of her characters. Up to Romola, this supportive role is not fundamentally questioned. This is most evident in the unfolding of the characters’ emotional development in a time of drastic social change. As a narrative interacting with collective traditions, Romola brings to bear on intense moments of moral struggle interpretative modes that belong to two distinctive models of historical continuation, thus throwing into relief the altered conception of history in Renaissance Florence. The significant turn in Eliot’s understanding of the moral function of communal memory starts with Felix Holt, where the titular hero seriously explores the possibility of renovating a communal tradition. However, his attempt to modify this tradition with an alternative tradition of culture poses questions about notions such as ‘origin’ and ‘inheritance’ and about his own identity as a reformer. Middlemarch is more concerned with the question of establishing a faith through altruistic aspirations. Yet in exploring the function of altruism as a new spirituality, Middlemarch reveals tensions between an impersonal grounding essential to the concept of ‘humanity’ and the need for personal access to it as a way of self-realization. In mythologizing Dorothea’s spiritual sentiments, the novel reveals a unique capacity of the metaphorical mode of shared insights: such mythologizing may historicize memory without postulating historical distance and may restore a figurative dimension to history without reducing history to mere memory. Daniel Deronda makes a vigorous attempt at recon-

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

12

13

structing a secular religion. Its study of national consciousness ties together threads of important issues explored in other novels and thus constitutes a very important stage of Eliot’s conception. The imagined nature of Jewish ‘corporate existence’ (ITS, 261) and the mode in which such a tradition may renew or reinvent itself point up the possibility of having a transcendental form of communal memory. The relationship of Jewish national consciousness to English social life becomes evident in the novel’s comments, both implicit and explicit, on English national character. Eliot’s representation of the Jewish nationalist leaders is compounded by a topical concern with the station and duty of the intellectual. The paradoxical relationship between the intellectual and the community is the fundamental problem with which Eliot herself has to grapple; a natural and in some ways inevitable outcome of her lifelong investigation into the role of communal memory.

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Memory, History and George Eliot

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

This page intentionally left blank

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’: Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede

The point is not to possess the past, but to understand the force of its claim upon the present without thereby supposing that such a claim is sovereign, or that contemporaneity is simply swamped or displaced by memory. (Richard Terdiman, Present Past, p. 356; original emphases) ‘Memory’, observes George Henry Lewes, ‘may be best comprehended as a reinstatement of Feeling’ (PLM3, 160). The ‘reinstatement’ of the mentality of English rural communities, particularly the mode in which communal feelings formulate and transmit themselves over generations, is a predominant theme in Eliot’s early fictional works. For the characters, memory as process may mean being seized by these feelings and interpreting them, and memory as result the moral meaning of such specific interpretations. Together they constitute an important aspect of Eliot’s study of the natural history of English rural life. Memory in both senses, like memory in general, is now no longer regarded, as Peter Burke summarizes, as ‘the innocent activities they were once taken to be’: ‘[we] are learning to take account of conscious or unconscious selection, interpretation and distortion’.1 This interpretative and sometimes inventive nature of memory figures prominently in Eliot’s novels and short stories. Yet it is rarely isolated from feelings conceived as an ineradicable link to a past, a past that has been lived through by ancestral and present generations and exerts an inexorable claim on the present. Just as the act of remembering may organize the past, so the formation of happenings in that past – both feelings and events – may shape and condition the 15

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

1

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

process of narrating the past for the present. To emphasize this inexorable link is to highlight the empirical validity of what David Carr calls ‘human events, or more particularly . . . events that are humanly experienceable’.2 The dialectical relations between memory as interpretative narrative and memory as an indelible link form the focus of this chapter. These relations spell out the complex denotation of the word ‘natural’ in Eliot’s understanding of ‘natural history’. W. J. Harvey has noted that Eliot understood how akin ‘our most serious beliefs may be to the passions of our primitive ancestors’.3 Such an understanding recalls a heated discussion of her time about how moral feelings are formulated and inherited. Several key notions need to be clarified before we discuss the fictional works in detail. These terms are essential to the arguments of this book as a whole and thus deserve careful examination here. Terms such as ‘feeling’ may evoke uses that are important for their epistemological resonance. In the latter part of the nineteenth century in Europe, observes Ian Hacking, ‘The sciences of memory were new … what would previously have been debates on the moral and spiritual plane took place at the level of factual knowledge’.4 This observation offers a contextual clue to the need for Eliot to negotiate between the broadly termed intuitionist and positivist models of knowledge in her understanding, which, however, defies being reduced to either, as is the case with several of her contemporary thinkers.

‘Two systems of concentric circles’ In Eliot’s use of the term ‘fellow-feeling’ (AB, 21:349), the word ‘feeling’ stood for both emotion and moral thinking. It denoted not only the capacity or readiness to feel but also a fact or state of self-reflective and moral consciousness. She was not alone in this. Though not necessarily taken as interchangeable, ‘emotion’, ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ were evoked more often for the overlap or convergence of their meanings than for their sharp distinction in the writings of a number of thinkers. In so far as the capacity or readiness to feel promises and necessitates interpretation and invention, the fact or state of consciousness seems to be implicated in the perceptual or psychological structure of an awareness of the past, sometimes in the very physical presence of the past. In Comte, ‘emotions’ both suggested moral values and connoted the possibility of being developed or cultivated into a secular religion. In the later writings of Spencer, the conscious operations of thought were set ‘within a naturalistic framework of explanation which presents

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

16

17

thinking as being only different in degree from feeling’.5 Alexander Bain found that the three terms ‘Feeling, Emotion, and Consciousness’ were hardly distinguishable and might ‘express one and the same fact or attribute of mind’.6 In Lewes’s The Problems of Life and Mind: Third Series, ‘Feeling’ was ‘understood as involving Consciousness’, and ‘very generally the term [Consciousness] is synonymous with Feeling, i.e., Sentience’ (PLM3, 143). J. S. Mill observed that ‘Feeling, in the proper sense of the term, is a genus, of which Sensation, Emotion, and Thought, are subordinate species’.7 Eliot had a clear understanding of how feelings can be associated with thought by way of memory. She was particularly interested in how memory may enrich and develop the moral awareness of her characters. Similarly, altruistic emotions are essential to Comte because, in ordering both feelings and reason, they can perform the role of religion when they triumph over egoistic impulses. In Comte, the preponderant power in human conduct belongs to instincts and emotions. Comtean positivism was, however, further developed by Lewes, as he ‘[added] Bain’s associational psychology and Spencer’s views on evolution and heredity to a basically Comtean methodology and morality’,8 in contrast to Comte who reduced psychology to physiology and, as Lewes pointed out, ‘denied a place among the fundamental sciences to a Psychology pursued on’ ‘the Introspective Method’ (SP, 54). Lewes’s theories open up a wide range of interpretative possibilities. He believed that ‘states of consciousness, whatever their origin, are feelings capable of being re-felt in the forms of images and memories’ (SP, 88; original emphasis) and feelings are the agent that may associate incongruous ideas and images. This theory of memory exemplifies the ‘fundamental law of mental action’, the process in which some ‘neural tremors’ group themselves into ‘a definite sensation’, sensations into ‘perception’, perceptions into ‘conception’ and conceptions into ‘judgments’ (PLM3, 159). The significance of this theory may be better appreciated with the help of the ‘compost heap’ metaphor that Stuart Hampshire uses to distinguish between the two major models of memory: the associational and the organic. He compares the second model to a heap ‘in which all the organic elements, one after another as they are added, interpenetrate each other … each ingredient being at least modified, even transformed, by later ingredients’.9 Around the time Eliot wrote Scenes of Clerical Life, apart from the eighteenthcentury metaphysical model of the mind, which was continued by Sir William Hamilton, among others, phrenology also offered a materialist model of ‘scientific’ interpretation that would seem to overcome 10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

overly imaginative interpretations. In the brain are located not just the intellectual faculties but feelings as well, a view that influenced Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and W. B. Carpenter.10 Yet writings by physiological ‘scientists’ such as Bain were forming a more important tradition as his physiological theory accommodates the view that knowledge of the past experienced by individuals may be coloured by ‘the specific or personal interest’ that belongs to past moments, and that recollection of a past through ‘the narrative of others . . . is modified by the circumstances affecting verbal adhesion’.11 For all his physiological emphasis, W. B. Carpenter also claimed that ‘reminiscence . . . represents, not the actual occurrence, but the modified trace of it. And this is the source of an enormous number of “fallacies of testimony,” which recent experiences of Mesmerism and Spiritualism have brought into strong light.’12 Lewes’s conception, as he points out at the beginning of The Study of Psychology, fuses the tradition of ‘Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Condillac, Hartley, and James Mill’ and that of ‘Cabanis, Gall, and recent physiologists’, both ‘the introspective analysis of the phenomena in their mental aspect’ and ‘the physical aspect’ with ‘the biological conditions’ (SP, 4). He was not the only one to attempt this argument. J. S. Mill, for example, claimed both traditions to be valuable in his A System of Logic. Yet Lewes was able to specify stages in the act of memory and considered their interactions morally meaningful. Of course, to associate memory with morality was nothing new. Ancient philosophers such as Aristotle emphasized this and so did later critical philosophers such as Locke, or natural philosophers such as David Hartley who advanced Locke’s theory by endowing associations with values. Samuel Rogers, writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, explicitly commented on such a connection in his Pleasures of Memory (1792),13 as did Thomas Brown, the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind.14 Lewes’s theory is significant to the extent that he upheld the associative function of images without letting it become the limit of their capacities. Lewes also recognized that ‘The Relativity of Feeling’ becomes ‘the basis of the Relativity of Knowledge’ (FC, I, 255), since the formation of feeling involves ‘Sensible Impressions, i.e., definite Sensations’ and ‘Inferences, which are the reproductions and recombinations of such Impressions’ (FC, I, 256). Spencer, though holding on to a physiological basis of sense experience, does recognize ‘The Relativity of Relations between Feelings’, to the extent that our understanding of the external world does not necessarily correspond to the reality of that world. Yet, unlike

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

18

19

Eliot and Lewes who look for correlation between the two, Spencer assumes that feelings ‘have no resemblance to the agents beyond consciousness which cause them’ (PP, I, 210) and believed, according to Lewes, that ‘a change in the point of view alters the character of the events, and that psychological facts cease to be facts of the organism when they are viewed subjectively’ (SP, 60). Eliot appreciated the enormous potential that memory offered for interpretation. Lewes’s theory can best support her understanding of how memory is evoked and mediated by images and words. Both of them were very sensitive to the nuances and depths of the human psyche evoked by images and words. She went even further. For her, verbal narration of communal feelings cannot ensure that such feelings will necessarily be passed on in the same way as scientific knowledge, which is not as susceptible to subjective alteration. These feelings may transcend such scientific formulations as the ‘psychological evolution of sociological material’ (FC, I, 134). The point of outlining the process of association is thus to see how memories of early life may ‘still live in us, and transform our perception into love’ (MF, 1:5:36). Her understanding may best be elucidated with Michael Polanyi’s more recent distinction, even when the imaginative nature of science in her day is allowed for: traditionalism, which requires us to believe before we know, and in order that we may know, is based on a deeper insight into the nature of knowledge and of the communication of knowledge than is a scientific rationalism that would permit us to believe only explicit statements based on tangible data and derived from these by a formal inference, open to repeated testing.15 As Eliot herself observed in 1868, ‘The old phrases should not give way to scientific explanation, for speech is to a great extent like sculpture, expressing observed phenomena & remaining true in spite of Harvey & Bichat’ (E, 436). In contrast to the Comtean insistance on ‘that necessary and permanent subordination of imagination to observation’ (EC, 139), her attitude is less ‘scientific’ in that she is sensitive to both the literal and metaphorical natures of communal feelings. This perhaps explains why Comte can be seen to represent the only ‘nonreligious morality’ that is ‘a system in a low key; a little common sense, a little axiom about human nature and its power of doing good, and a little incentive – all quickly intelligible, and rational in easily explicable terms’.16

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Of course, memory has been associated with interpretation or invention from ancient times onward. As early as the eighth century BC, Hesiod, one of the earliest Greek poets, already used in his epic Theogony the allegory of Mnemosyne, who was presented as both the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses. Carlyle reminded his readers in 1830 of the same affinity in his essay ‘On History’, though later in 1843 in his Past and Present, this claim was balanced by his anxious need to ascertain the physicality of memory, as ‘traces still existing will verify’ (WTC, X, 51) the incidents in the history of ‘St. Edmund’s Town and Monastery’ (WTC, X, 50; original emphasis).17 In 1858, the year in which Scenes of Clerical Life was published and Adam Bede was in the making, Thomas Brown, while linking this ‘happy allegorical illustration’ to ‘the Virtues’, showed a full awareness of Mnemosyne’s relationship to ‘the Muses’ being the result of ‘all the exercises of fancy and the understanding’.18 Carlyle’s acute awareness of such a mode of remembering parallels Eliot’s perception of memory as metaphorical. This is significant because it was only during the late 1860s and early 1870s that ‘the implications of [Dugald] Stuart’s point [made in 1792] that memory always involves the reinvention of the past were felt’, at a time when the existence of the material traces of memories in the brain was increasingly questioned;19 it appears that, before this time, Eliot had already engaged with this issue in detail in some of her early works. Similar interest followed later as, for example, in F. H. Bradley who in 1874 saw this imaginative connection with the past in terms of ‘a process of constant and habitual corrected recollection’ and ‘a mediated sequence of phenomena’. His attempt to transcend the intuitionist–positivist dichotomy has its own subtlety; for him the ‘mediated’ past as ‘historical fact … is never the fiction of a random invention’.20 Although ‘all things’, as Carlyle observes, ‘have two faces’ (WTC, X, 57), the romantic-historical attitude towards natural history in Eliot’s works, when expressed in a language resonant with positivist associations, creates its own ambiguities. The mere suggestion that moral or racial feelings may be transmitted or, to use a word of more cachet in her time, ‘inherited’, would cause anxiety in her readers, as this was an unsettled issue.21 What exactly does ‘inherit’ mean? How can one have an ‘inherited share in the hard-won treasures of thought, which generations of painful toil have laid up for the race of man’ (MF, 4:3:252)? Spencer would uphold, à la the French biologist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, an unconscious physiological transmission, the ‘a priori truth’ that ‘[implies] cognitions that have been rendered

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

20

21

organic by immense accumulations of experiences, received partly by the individual, but mainly by all ancestral individuals whose nervous system he inherits’.22 Memory, when tethered to physiology, seems to defy attempts of imaginative invention. In Lewes, on the other hand, moral intuition can be regarded as ‘à priori intuitional doctrine’ (SP, 151): ‘Experiences become organised as Instincts, and generalised as Knowledge; Knowledge itself, in its highest stages, becomes organised as Intuitions and Logical Forms, which have the facility and necessity of Instinct’ (PLM3, 89). Yet ‘its explanation lies in the principles of experience’ (SP, 151). The examples that Lewes uses either prove or disprove the Lamarckian hypothesis – he does recognize the transmission of tendencies but is not very precise about the extent to which moral feelings can be inherited. His notions of ‘organised impressions’, ‘residua’ and ‘habits’ consist in both the ‘acquired dispositions of experience’ and the ‘connate dispositions of the mechanism which we inherit’ (PLM3, 54). Eliot was informed by all these theories. Instances suggesting various possibilities abound in her novels, in which we often hear the bell of a priori knowledge ringing, though faint and modest.23 In ‘Amos Barton’, the narrator suggests metaphorically that Milly Barton ‘did not take all her love from the earth when she died. She had left some of it in Patty’s heart’ (‘Barton’, ‘Conclusion’:71). The legacy of Milly Barton has a philosophical overtone as well. Fellow-feeling in general springs from ‘the sympathetic impulses that need no law’ (R, 9:101). It is part of the character’s habit and can be ‘a sweet habit of the blood’ (DD, 3:18); otherwise, ‘how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?’ (SM, 1:4). Such notions seemed important to Eliot, as she found in H. T. Buckle’s History of Civilization in England ‘some strangely unphilosophic opinions’ such as his belief that ‘there is no such thing as race or hereditary transmission of qualities’ (L, II, 415; original emphases). Nevertheless, the uncertain prospect of transmission still seemed troubling. ‘It must be remembered’, as one historian reminds us, ‘that until the development of genetics the details of how and why mutations are produced remained extremely vague.’ 24 While it is true that in the Darwinian age the term ‘inherit’ or ‘heredity’ might yield an immediate association with things derived physiologically and that Eliot’s own discovery later in the 1870s of Darwin’s concern with inheritance called her attention to the physiological implications that heredity may have for animals and plants,25 the Darwinian myth could have in fact overridden the other side of what equally charac-

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

terizes the age ‘when “a fact is not quite a scientific fact at all” and when “the remnant of the mythical” is at its most manifest’. Moreover, ‘in the then current state of genetic knowledge many of the processes of inheritance were beyond explanation’.26 Physiological transmission was taken to be a possibility, not necessarily a universal truth. And ‘the transmission of environmentally-induced traits to the next generation is just what does happen in culture—it is a truism to say it’.27 Lewes’s illustrations to support his argument for inheritance reflect precisely such a situation. They often concentrate on the moral consequences of physiological transmission instead of the mode of such transmission (SP, 147–8). The same interest in the ‘mental aspect’ must have been one of the reasons for Eliot to read Darwin’s book on emotions. In her early novels and short stories, such an interest has already started to show. She was perhaps conscious of the ambiguity of the word ‘hereditary’ when she explained some time later that the subject of her dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy was ‘a symbol of the part which is played in the general human lot by hereditary conditions in the largest sense, and of the fact that what we call duty is entirely made up of such conditions’ (Cross, III, 43). The sense of physiological inheritance did not lead Eliot to ignore the persistent impact of experience. She did take note in her readings of the idea that ‘inherited experience is a sort of pre-existence’ (GEN, II, 73). Yet, unlike Thomas Hardy’s narrator who more than three decades later was definite about Tess’s ‘incautiousness of character inherited from her race’,28 Eliot’s characters send out mixed messages (for example, Deronda, Tito, Fedalma, Esther Lyon and Maggie Tulliver). Deronda is a special case with his ‘inherited yearning’ (DD, 63:697), who has the yearning commensurate with his descent before his racial or communal identity is revealed. For Maggie, her awareness of fellow-feeling is preceded by a knowledge of her affinity with her community. It is this knowledge that enables her to absorb communal insights and beliefs. If she leaves St Ogg’s, she will be ‘cut off from the past’ (MF, 7:2:436) and break ‘the most sacred ties that can ever be formed on earth’ (MF, 6:14:417). Not surprisingly, in the classroom of the night school, Adam Bede feels ‘a momentary stirring of the old fellow-feeling’, a sympathy for those rough men ‘humbly labouring through their reading lesson’ (AB, 21:349). The unconscious governing of these feelings compels the characters to cling to their ‘medium’ much beyond their own choosing. Eliot’s uses of the words ‘inheritance’ and ‘hereditary’ thus connote a broad cultural sense, which may include a physiological connection

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

22

23

as well as the result of living together and being influenced in the process. The loose application of the word ‘hereditary’ and, for that matter, the notion ‘to inherit’, is not only typical of, but central to, her depiction of the characters’ concrete and historical environment. If the characters inherit feelings, they obtain the affective states largely because of, not in spite of, their familial or communal lineage. The validity of the notion of ‘inherited feeling’ thus lies in the context of its use.29 Because the ordinary and ‘scientific’ uses of the word ‘hereditary’ in her time drew their distinctions somewhat differently from modern usage, the notion of ‘hereditary’ or ‘inherit’ provided her with ample opportunities to address both the intuitionist and positivist connotations. This dual perspective also defines what Spencer calls the ‘all-essential’ influence of ‘environing actions and relations’ (PP, I, 391). In the definitions of the word ‘environment’ current in Eliot’s time, these actions are essential and unavoidable; yet they are unpredictable and latent as they condition and shape the characters emotionally. They may ‘[take] the form’, as with Adam Bede, ‘of principle in his mind’ and are ‘knowledge to be acted on, as much as the knowledge that damp will cause rust’ (AB, 19:316). To the Victorians, the term ‘environment’ would have sounded differently from the way it can sound today. It hardly meant any material or economic conditions, but already had a modern connotation derived from its basic sense of being surrounded: it stood for ‘the conditions under which any person or thing lives or is developed; the sum-total of influences which modify and determine the development of life or character’ (OED). Reading through all the examples cited under this sense in the OED, we shall not be surprised to find that the organicist, holistic and developmental senses are exclusively Victorian. In the second edition of his Principles of Psychology (1870–2),30 Spencer discussed ‘the division of the environment into two halves, soil and air’ (PP, I, 301). In 1874, Henry Sidgwick indicated in The Method of Ethics that ‘The organism is continually adapted to its environment’ (‘environment’, OED). The sense of ‘environment’ implied in J. S. Mill’s theory of ethology, or the ‘science’ of character formation, is another case in point. Comte used the word in a similar way: ‘The harmony between the living being and the corresponding medium (as I shall call its environment) evidently characterizes the fundamental condition of life’ (PPAC, I, 360; original emphasis). It is possible that this modern connotation was the very reason why Eliot suspected an inconsistency in Comte’s understanding, apropos of the influence of the environment, that ‘the living are

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

“de plus en plus dominés par les morts”’, and that ‘the influence of the environment on Man is a continually decreasing one, his reaction on the world greater & greater’ (GEN, I, 184). In this case, much depends on which senses of the words ‘environment’ and ‘world’ are meant. The earliest use of this modern sense which dates back to 1828 can be traced to Carlyle when he talked in his essay on Goethe about ‘an environment of circumstances’ (‘environment’, OED).31 In his essay ‘Diderot’, Carlyle found it ‘a great truth’ that man ‘by necessity takes his complexion, vesture, embodiment, from these [Circumstances], and is in all practical manifestations modified by them almost without limit’ (WTC, XXVIII, 229). Carlyle’s novel use had a great impact upon his readers. The three-dimensional, historical and concrete nature of ‘environment’ found its way into the thinking mode of a generation. When Lewes talked about external conditions, what he really meant was ‘the collective accumulations of centuries, condensed in knowledge, beliefs, prejudices, institutions, and tendencies’ (FC, I, 124). Lewes’s definition suggests that these new senses take ‘environment’ as a kind of external knowledge that may be, as with Eliot, internalized through imagination and memory. The potential of ‘de-condensing’ these ‘collective accumulations’ for interpretation is something easily overlooked in the other Victorian uses of the term mentioned above. Yet the function of such accumulations also asserts an almost inalienable raison d’être of their own, since any change in their influence may inevitably reshape the recollecting perspective of individuals growing up in a given environment. ‘A human being in this aged nation of ours’, observes one of Eliot’s narrators, ‘is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences’ (M, 40:399).

Interpretability and ‘material links’ The interpretative capacity hidden in the ‘environing actions’ is extensively explored in Eliot’s early works. What is, for instance, the nature of an ‘environment’ such as Milby and Hayslope? In ‘Janet’s Repentance’, the narrator constantly talks about Milby as if it has a concerted ‘mind’. The ‘Milby mind’ (‘JR’, 3:217), like all average minds, thinks, interprets, and is, furthermore, capable of resorting to its memory to single out someone like Mr Tryan, the new evangelical parson, as ‘a great anomaly’ (‘JR’, 3:217). It defines for itself what constitutes communal knowledge, ranging from incidents and experiences to spiritual belief. ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’ provides insight into

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

24

25

how such a ‘mind’ works. ‘The parishioners who were old enough to remember [Mrs Gilfil’s] arrival were not generally gifted with descriptive powers’ (‘GL’, 1:84). As a result, the life force that sustains memory within the village rests in someone like Mrs Patten, who is the ‘one exception … whose strong memory and taste for personal narrative made her a great source of oral tradition in Shepperton’ (‘GL’, 1:85). Being able to evoke descriptive details from the past thus becomes a creative act, for events alone will not suffice for and as knowledge; only when events are transformed by a ‘personal narrative’ can memories acquire a lasting power to become knowledge. Likewise, Mr Irwin is quick to find Mrs Poyser ‘quite original in her talk … one of those untaught wits that help to stock a country with proverbs’ (AB, 33:93). The narrator in Adam Bede is eager to send us back to how words and images may provoke memories. ‘The finest language’, the narrator tells us, ‘is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as “light,” “sound,” “stars,” “music,” … it is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful … stirring the long-winding fibres of your memory, and enriching your present with your most precious past’ (AB, 50:310–11). This particular power of words and images is best demonstrated by the dramatic illustration later in Romola, where Baldassarre at the garden party is desperate to ‘[hold] all things in the grasp of language’. As soon as the words start to make sense to him, Baldassarre acquires full access to his memory ‘like one who enters on a great inheritance’ (R, 38:339): ‘He saw a name, and the images of deeds rose with it; he saw the mention of a deed, and he linked it with a name’ (R, 38:340). They are ‘the magic signs that conjure up a world’ (R, 38:339). The purpose of tracing this process is to see how sensations lead to feelings and eventually give rise to struggling perceptions or thoughts. This view advances contemporary psychological theories such as Bain’s that see the function of the ‘recal [sic] of names by things and of things by names’ as ‘bringing in additional links to aid a feeble tie’ in memory.32 Words and images thus open up the possibility of making past mental states more intimately discerning through its cognitive significance. We may recall Lewes’s idea that ‘Perception is the Logic of Sensations’ (PLM3, 457). Perception here is not just the consequence of recollection, but also the organizing element that makes recollection meaningful.33 Eliot regards such memory as superseding the normal recollection of past events, since potentially it can clarify experience and provide knowledge. In Lewes’s words, ‘Each perception is itself

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

the revival of many past experiences, and is by them apperceived’ (PLM3, 106–7; original emphasis). While Mrs Patten can indulge in her free description of Mrs Gilfil in ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’, Adam Bede is able to understand the recollection of the past as valuable because it brings with it ‘a sense of added strength’ (AB, 54:365). Likewise, in Middlemarch, the past comes back to Dorothea ‘with larger interpretation’ (M, 62:621). Language can act as a medium of transmission because social groups are themselves, as Paul Connerton points out, ‘made up of a system, or systems, of communication’.34 This emphasis on language, however, begs one question. While words may sustain a vaguely felt moral tradition of a community, they are not always the tradition itself. Adam Bede’s understanding of how notions and feelings work differently highlights this important aspect: ‘It isn’t notions sets people doing the right thing—it’s feelings. It’s the same with the notions in religion as it is with math’matics’ (AB, 17:272). Yet, it is equally true in Adam Bede that the move from notions to feelings is precisely the move of interpretation and understanding. In terms of the sources of the moral sense, Eliot is more willing than Lewes is to reconcile organic experience and intuitive sensation.35 Nevertheless, while they both give some thought to ‘[the] tendency of feeling and expression to react upon one another’,36 neither of them sufficiently spells out the specific forms of this interaction. This is perhaps why language is not the only means by which one can have access to the past. Memory depends on sympathy and love as well. The love of Humanity, predominant in Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede, is largely couched in the terms of Christian love. This love is like a ‘fountain’ or ‘as kindly a warmth as the morning sunlight’ (‘JR’, 8:247). For Caterina Sarti, love can grow only if it is ‘nourished by memories as well as hopes’ (‘GL’, 19:180); even for someone like Robert Dampster, memory of his mother’s love for him in childhood remains ‘a nucleus of healthy life in an organ hardening by disease’ (‘JR’, 7:237). Hence ‘there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues’ (‘JR’, 7:233). Memory in Eliot is, both literally and metaphorically, revivable with accompanying feelings which are open to further interpretation. Sympathy is bemused as ‘the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love’ (AB, 50:302). Interpretability may nevertheless generate a sense of relativity and unpredictability in meaning – a mode of ‘inbuilt interpretation’, as Frank Kermode calls it.37 Emotional anticipation and recapitulation may entail an uncertainty in the construction of moral meaning. They

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

26

27

also direct towards alternatives and possibilities.38 If, by addressing ‘illimitable’ interpretability (M, 3:24), Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede permit diverse extensions of meaning and allow for relativity and uncertainty, they also demonstrate that moral meaning does have a firm hold on emotional life. If the truth that we derive from collective insights is relative so that ‘Life cradles within Life’ and ‘the Present becomes the matrix of the Future, as the Past was of the Present’,39 the certainty of and about a past can only come from these diverse sources. Eliot is preoccupied with the emergence, accidental or inevitable, of what is certain from what is uncertain. This is the very process through which moral truth can be striven for and validated. If communal insights are recast in and reshaped by a present perspective of narration, to what extent can one have access to the village past? If imagination, as the narrator declares in Adam Bede, ‘is a licensed trespasser’ (AB, 6:103), is it then a free spirit that in trespassing on the past subsumes it in the present and necessarily turns it into the present? Eliot wanted to be not only precise but also concrete in her study of natural history. Around 1857, in her essay ‘History, Biography, Voyages and Travels’, she called for more attention to ‘life outside of courts, and senates, and battle-fields’.40 For her, as for Carlyle and other nineteenth-century historians such as J. R. Green, the physicality of a place can be a symbolic shorthand that both conceals and reveals the formation of human history, and is vital to, in Carlyle’s words, ‘recording the presence, bodily concrete coloured presence of things’.41 He was not an average man. Yet such men as he are reared here and there in every generation of our peasant artisans—with an inheritance of affections nurtured by a simple family life of common need and common industry, and an inheritance of faculties trained in skilful courageous labour … Their lives have no discernible echo beyond the neighbourhood where they dwelt, but you are almost sure to find there some good piece of road, some building, some application of mineral produce, some improvement in farming practice, some reform of parish abuses, with which their names are associated by one or two generations after them. (AB, 19:320–1) Green’s conception of the experiential basis of memory is equally emphatic. In his Stray Studies, he attaches great importance to the history of the common people. Their story has to be located in an overwhelming array of details and events: 10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

there is hardly better historic training for a man than to set him frankly in the streets of a quiet little town like Bury St. Edmunds, and bid him work out the history of the men who lived and died there. In the quiet, quaintly-named streets, in the town-mead and the market-place, in the lord’s mill beside the stream, in the ruffed and furred brasses of its burghers in the church, lies the real life of England and Englishmen … It is just in the pettiness of its details, in its commonplace incidents, in the want of marked features and striking events, that the real lesson of the whole story lies.42 It is only in this sense of physical presence that the narrator of Adam Bede reminds us: ‘There are faces which nature charges with a meaning and pathos not belonging to the single human soul . . . but speaking the joys and sorrows of foregone generations’ (AB, 26:430). The physical presence of the past, nevertheless, also suggests that there is more to memory than just interpretation. In her review of R.W. Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect, Eliot lamented over the futility of ‘retaining the spirit along with the forms of the past’ (E, 29). In Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede, that general idea is very much tested. Without negating that earlier position altogether, these works present how various forms of the village past may reappear with its spirit. These forms of the past are never simply subsumed in, or superseded by, the present effort to select or interpret. The narrator of Adam Bede is insistent on this point: ‘Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force’ (AB, 50:302). In Eliot’s early novels, one’s affinity with one’s ‘land’ and ‘place’, or the ‘medium’ in which one moves about, is an experiential connection that contains an ineradicable claim from the past. Adam Bede provides a philosophical outline of the symbiotic interdependence of the physical reality of one’s environment and the sediments of human feelings that give meaning to it. We hear Mrs Poyser protesting: ‘but I should be loath to leave th’ old place, and the parish where I was bred and born, and father afore me. We should leave our roots behind us, I doubt, and niver thrive again’ (AB, 32:91). Any change in habitual life will be threatening to the Poysers, for their ‘habitat’ Hall Farm is not just a dwelling place, but the location of their habitual life. The extent of psychological discomfort caused by such displacement may vary for each character, but the experience of discomfort itself is perhaps an undeniable outcome. Eliot offers an interesting simile for the persistence of such a discomfort: ‘Our habitual life is like a wall hung with pictures, which has been shone on by

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

28

29

the suns of many years: take one of the pictures away, and it leaves a definite blank space, to which our eyes can never turn without a sensation of discomfort’ (‘JR’, 10:254). More crucially, apart from causing psychological trauma, the removal of physical continuity may put an end to narrative continuity. This theme continues into The Mill on the Floss. When he is prompted to buy Mr Tulliver’s Dorlcote Mill in The Mill on the Floss, Mr Wakem knows, as much as Tulliver does, that this is taking away most of the physical reality of Tulliver’s life, which, predictably, sends him to the family Bible to search for the certainty of shared continuity. Memory thus needs such locations to take shape and dwell in: this idea can be clarified with the narrator’s comment in Silas Marner on Marner’s exile from the church in Lantern Yard, which is supposedly ‘the fostering home of his religious emotions’ (SM, 2:21): ‘Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life … on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land’ (SM, 2:20). Earlier in Adam Bede, the seasonal changes, as many critics have pointed out, suggest a movement of life punctuated by rhythms and rituals such as birth and death, marriage and harvest supper. Moreover, these archetypal activities are capable of sustaining their own continuation in history. Timeless in themselves, they have helped to sustain the presence of a past that not only subsists, but must also be experienced on its own terms, in the present. They acquire the role of historical witness, analogous to that of the permanent presence of architecture described by John Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of Architecture as maintaining a ‘sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable’, which ‘connects forgotten and following ages with each other’.43 While rituals tend to be registered in physical sensations, the evocation of sensation becomes primary, with or without interpretation, so that, for Eliot’s narrator, ‘The keenest eye will not serve, unless you have the delicate fingers, with their subtle nerve filaments, which elude scientific lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible world of human sensations’ (‘JR’, 11:259).

Dialectical relations The rhythms of external events are not external to the characters; the regular rituals and festivities tend to regulate the emotions of the Hayslope community but without limiting its development. These events may structure the orders of future narratives, but may not

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

exhaust all of their significance, which depends on the speaker or listener who will further proliferate such memory. The intrinsic connections between memory as retrospective narrative and memory as an inexorable link to the past constitute the mode of natural history of village life. The tangible nature of the funeral service for his father in the church forms part of Adam Bede’s memory: ‘the church service was the best channel he could have found for his mingled regret, yearning, and resignation … its recurrent responses and the familiar rhythm of its collects, seemed to speak for him as no other form of worship could have done’ (AB, 18:300). When Hetty’s story gets told in the future, the pattern of past happenings provides a certain sequential order for narrating them and conditions the plot design. The rhythm of the villagers’ emotional changes is thus counterpointed to the rhythm of the pastoral landscape; there is only limited presence of time in that landscape but there are numerous prescriptive means of measuring it. Such rhythm also provides the narrator with the opportunity of highlighting the monotony of predictability in such a landscape. The language of seasonal movement is, nevertheless, fundamental to the presentation of the characters’ moral lives. In spite of the fact that what has happened to Hetty, Adam, and Dinah is new to the memory of their community, the marriage bells keep on reiterating age-old conventions, or, rather, keep alive the spirit of the past, which can only be revered, but must not be dispossessed. In this sense, the meaning of Hetty’s story has little interpretative privilege over this ‘environing’ presence. Adam’s final report on Arthur provides an apt description that captures such a persistence: ‘Why, he’s altered and yet not altered’ (AB, ‘Epilogue’:376). The subsisting presence is capable of externalizing the meaning of new events. The archetypal rituals lend a universal form to the stories of Hetty, Adam and Arthur, while their personal interpretation rescues the stories from being merely predictable, what would simply prove Mrs Poyser’s time-tested wisdom. The Poysers and the Bedes need Hetty’s child-murder to arrive at a renewed understanding of their own way of life. But for moral insights to become and remain insights, such renewed understanding needs to be mediated through the language of village memory. The grammar, if not the semantics, of such a ‘language’ still resides in the regular rituals, reconfirmed in the chapter headings of Adam Bede – ‘Church’, ‘Going to the Birthday Feast’, ‘Dinner-Time’, ‘The Health-Drinking’, ‘The Games’, ‘The Dance’, ‘The Betrothal’, ‘The Harvest Supper’ and ‘Marriage Bells’. Carlyle was attracted to the connection between these two natures of

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

30

31

memory and asked: ‘Has the mind its cycles and seasons like Nature, varying from the fermentation of werden to the clearness of seyn; and this again and again; so that the history of a man is like the history of the world he lives in?’44 The language of the narrator poignantly captures such a correlation when anticipating Hetty’s tragedy in ‘[perfect] weather’ in July: ‘Nature seems to make a hot pause just then—all the loveliest flowers are gone; the sweet time of early growth and vague hopes is past; and yet the time of harvest and ingathering is not come, and we tremble at the possible storms that may ruin the precious fruit in the moment of its ripeness’ (AB, 22:373). As a form of representation, this language is beyond choice; ‘These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes . . . these furrowed and grassy fields … such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination’ (MF, 1:5:36). What demands to be remembered may condition how we remember, though not entirely what we remember. Such, it appears, is also the meaning of parades and ceremonies in Eliot’s other novels. Yet an analogy in ‘The Harvest Supper’ chapter in Adam Bede may help us to appreciate better the regulatory yet flexible nature of such ritualistic rhythms: ‘Now, the great ceremony of the evening was to begin—the harvest-song, in which every man must join: he might be in tune, if he liked to be singular, but he must not sit with closed lips. The movement was obliged to be in triple time; the rest was ad libitum’ (AB, 53:350; original emphasis). The emphasis on physical presence indicates that what is at issue is not whether the past still exists as an event or entity, but rather whether the link with the past depends on such an event or entity to be visibly and palpably established when it subsists in the moral meaning and interpretation of the present.45 This is a point made clearly in ‘Janet’s Repentance’, concerning how present interpretation inevitably relies on the physical registration of past experience: ‘Do not philosophic doctors tell us that we are unable to discern so much as a tree, except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate sensations … our discernment of men’s motives must depend on the completeness of the elements we can bring from our own susceptibility and our own experience’ (‘JR’, 11:258). Our ‘cunning’ may be ‘unconscious’, but this is precisely how ‘past and separate sensations’ make their presence discernible and known. No wonder to an imaginative landscape gardener in The Mill on the Floss, ‘it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid’ (MF, 2:1:134).

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Such ‘immovable’ certainty (MF, 2:1:133) and the reorganizing narrative often ‘mutate’ into each other. Impressions may have the potential of solidifying into events, when repeated memory is believed by the characters to have acquired the certainty of reality.46 The ‘transmutation’ is instrumental to knowledge on both communal and personal levels. Hetty’s chiasmic wish is typical: all the warmth of family and familiar fields ‘was what she would like to wake up to as a reality’ and ‘all the feverish life she had known … a short nightmare’ (AB, 36:125). In ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’, Caterina is most hurt when she believes that Anthony Wybrow has deserted her for Miss Assher: Wybrow ‘can forget everything: how he used to say he loved me’ (‘GL’, 5:124). For Caterina, her memory and his forgetfulness are largely subjective, so much so that she herself knows that his forgetfulness is only her speculation. ‘“Oh, it is cruel, it is cruel!” she burst out again aloud, as all those love-moments in the past returned upon her’ (‘GL’, 5:124). Here ‘by repeatedly picturing’ past experiences, Caterina is able to entertain ideas that attain what to W. B. Carpenter is ‘a force and vividness which equals or even exceeds that which the actual memory of them would afford’.47 The reader of course knows that her memory of cruelty is adolescent because her love depends very much on fantasy. For this cruelty to mature, it needs to be mellowed through intention, resolution and fulfilment, stages in the visible momentum of consequentiality. Caterina’s memory of cruelty lacks the profuse presence of melodrama essential to tragedy, for tragedy depends on both the agony of human predicament and adverse forces: Wybrow has hardly responded to her anguish. Yet when she believes she has stabbed Wybrow, there is something tragic about it, generating enough pathos that she has been dealt a cruel hand. What happens in between? It appears that common sense and shared assumptions – all the follies of wisdom – have blurred the boundaries between an interpretative and an actual link to the past. The blurring lends a touch of ingenuity to the plot. Mr Gilfil’s sense of justice and love for Caterina have convinced him, even when evidence is thin, that Wybrow is taking advantage of Caterina’s feelings. After all, Wybrow is the one who has gone to Sir Christopher to push for Gilfil’s marriage to Caterina. Caterina adopts Mr Gilfil’s view without further questioning, relying on his ‘clerical’ judiciousness and his trustworthiness as a friend. Mr Bates’s innocent remark about the supposedly forthcoming wedding of Wybrow and Miss Assher only further strengthens Caterina’s assumption when there is little for her to verify. The skirmishes and confrontations between Miss Assher and

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

32

33

Caterina have been set off and spurred on by a recollected congeries of incidents, misreadings and pretences. When we find Caterina no longer able to bear all this, the fictional narrative itself enacts the movement of her mind: it starts with a combination of a certainty and an assumption but ends with the effects of taking interpretation as existing conditions, thus covertly conferring on Caterina’s belief a materiality in the process: ‘Miss Assher’s beauty, and the nearness of the wedding, had come upon her like the pressure of a cold hand, rousing her from confused dozing to a perception of hard, familiar realities’. This is why to characters like her ‘words are facts, and, even when known to be false, have a mastery over their smiles and tears’ (‘GL’, 7:132). The impact of the actual link to the past may be seen more clearly in its absence. When Janet, worn out by her battered life, slips into sleep, ‘that uneasy slumber … is only better than wretched waking, because the life we seemed to live in it determines no wretched future, because the things we do and suffer in it are but hateful shadows, and leave no impress that petrifies into an irrevocable past’ (‘JR’, 16:279–80). The mental suspension of such a past points toward the capacity of this lived past ‘to ground or norm interpretations, so that [their] relativism might be brought into contact with a principled and nuanced complex of constraints’.48 When memory consists of vague impressions and has to be filtered through the lens of the present, the continuation of memory may rely on external presences. When Amos Barton is forced to leave Shepperton by the Revd Mr Carpe’s decision to replace him, the narrator tells us with good-humoured sympathy that ‘Amos was one who clung to all the material links between his mind and the past. His imagination was not vivid, and required the stimulus of actual perception’ (‘Barton’, 9:69). Here, ‘the material links’ are Shepperton, the ‘friends who knew his sorrows’ (‘Barton’, 9:69) and his wife Milly’s grave. He is brought to ruins by poverty and the exacerbating overstay of Countess Czerlaski, which together lead to Milly’s death from hardship. His suffering is, in a way, caused by the entrenched ‘insights’ of villagers like Mr Fellowes, Mr Ely and Mr Cleves, who misread his supposedly ‘ambiguous’ relationship with the Countess. Ironically, these people have contributed to both his past miseries and present consolation since they are the very community that in the end turn around to sympathize with him once they know the true story. What is striking here is that sorrow itself is apt to fade into oblivion if not turned into tangible presence. Consciousness of past sorrows cannot provide a version of the past unless such a past

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

reincarnates itself in material forms such as friends or graves. Yet still, for Amos, these links matter not just because they are a physical means to retrieve the narratable past, but rather because they are the object of his ‘actual perception’ (‘Barton’, 9:69) that can enable him to ward off the threat of uprootedness, both mentally and physically: he needs the certainty of the present so that his connection with the past can be a blending of materiality and imagination, opaque yet comfortable and comforting. The narrator returns to his need for this physical certainty again when observing Amos’s visit to Milly’s tomb years later: ‘He stood a few minutes reading over and over again the words on the tombstone, as if to assure himself that all the happy and unhappy past was a reality’ (‘Barton’, 10:71). The narrator is insightful in recognizing how material presence may be wilfully transformed into a means of imagining the past. Emphasizing the need for such presence may marginalize the mental process of reconstructing its physicality. The risk is, however, worth taking. Instead of being a mere relic from the past, the tombstone appears to Barton, as to Proust, as ‘something … common both to the past and to the present’, which nevertheless ‘is much more essential than either of them’.49 Eliot also warns against the danger in mere verbal claim to a direct access to the past, as such claim may empty this accessibility of its essence. ‘Janet’s Repentance’, for example, starts by dismissing the naive ‘wisdom’ in asserting such a connection as a ‘fact’. The warning is necessary because, as Gillian Beer points out, ‘The axis of the factual and the marvellous was balanced curiously for the Victorians. In their use of the word fact they often combine the idea of performance with that of observation … Moreover, fact in much Victorian writing partakes still of the heroic connotations of its cognate form, feat.’50 The breaking down of a direct link is vividly presented when Robert Dempster and Luke Byles argue over the different etymologies of the word ‘Presbyterian’ that each believes to be correct. To Mr Tomlinson, who tries to pacify the confrontation, ‘history was a process of ingenious guessing’ (‘JR’, 1:192). Mr Byles, unable to tolerate this woolly attitude, insists right away that his understanding of who the Presbyterians were is a ‘fact’: ‘It’s not a question of likelihood; it’s a known fact’ (‘JR’, 1:192). Robert Dempster thinks that either his version must be right or there will be no fact, because as someone who is ‘known through the county, entrusted with the affairs of half a score parishes’, he should have the authority to override whatever has already been circulating as a known fact (‘JR’, 1:192). These different attitudes effectively distinguish between memory based on events and

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

34

35

memory based on expedient invention. Although Mr Byles has never doubted the absolute authority of what he believes to be facts, when the seriousness of all three characters is deflated by the comic relief of dramatic irony, the narration shifts its emphasis. What prompts Mr Byles to action is the rhetorical power of being able then and there to claim memories as facts – a triumph of the moment; because of this, whether his version is true to the past is no longer the issue.51 His recollection may very well be correct; yet the melodrama of rhetorical exchanges has marginalized, if not devalued, the authority of his knowledge. What the narrator is more interested in is the extent to which Byles and Dempster care about the subjective control over what will go down as the insights of their grand local community. This exemplifies the need to transcend mere rhetoric, and thus to follow, in the words of one of Eliot’s narrators, ‘a higher logic than the verbal’ (MF, 6:2:335). This is a sense of transcendence that offers a more measured understanding of rhetorical power than the understanding of Carlyle’s ‘Editor’ in Past and Present who asks, ‘Who can doubt, after what we have said [about the history of St Edmundsbury], that there was a Monastery here at one time?’ (WTC, X, 52). Likewise, the physical presence of the past may not guarantee its meaningfulness for the present. We are told that Mr Dempster’s playbill for his ‘memorable campaign against the Tryanites’ (‘JR’, 10:252) ‘ought by all means to be preserved amongst the materials of our provincial religious history’ (‘JR’, 9:249). To this purpose, the narrator would ‘subjoin a faithful copy’ (‘JR’, 9:249). The phrase ‘faithful copy’ here is effective. If ‘faithful’ means being true to the original (as in recapturing the essence of its material presence), then the use of the word ‘faithful’ weighs down the playful tone of the narrator which has up to then successfully whipped up the melodrama of Robert Dempster’s ‘mischief’. It is only when whether this copy of the playbill is faithful or not becomes inessential that irony can be clearly generated out of the whole scene. Eliot is adroit in deflating the rhetoric of unalterable presence so as to be true to characterization: instead of detracting from her commitment to imagination, such presence is very much responsible for it. This position provides the terms for us to understand why, in her review of Ruskin’s Modern Painters (Volume III) in 1856, Eliot saw Ruskinian realism as ‘the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature’,52 and why she pronounced in Adam Bede, apropos of Dutch paintings, that ‘[falsehood] is so easy, truth so difficult’ (AB, 17:267–8). Truth is difficult to achieve because it is often couched in

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

interpretation, augmentation and invention; falsehood is easy not because it may easily appear to be true but because it may stem from an ossified, reductive and therefore superficial presence of what is true and real. She thus emphasizes the need to observe humble lives ‘as they have appeared in different ages, and under various social conditions’ (E, 336). This is not to deny that such a tenet is hard to sustain. Stories, when presented as events, may exert a persistent presence, which may challenge, or even become an obstacle to, their representation. The moral ‘enlightenment’ in Caterina is achieved by replacing a short-term memory with a long-term one – short-term for making sense of immediate conditions and long-term for its enduring possibility of being transformed into sympathy and fellow-feelings. In Chapter 15, after she ‘kills’ Captain Wybrow in the Rookery, Caterina rushes to tell Sir Christopher the news and falls fainting on the floor. When she comes to, ‘the present is visible, but only as a strange writing, and the interpreter Memory is not yet there’ (‘GL’, 15:159). The narrator tries to direct our reading: ‘There’, we are told, ‘was the link at which the chain of consciousness had snapped, and the events of the morning were beginning to recur dimly like a half-remembered dream’ (‘GL’, 15:159; original emphasis). Yet, ‘At the sight of Anthony lying dead, her nature had rebounded from its new bias of resentment and hatred to the old sweet habit of love’, a love that is ‘[the] earliest and the longest [that] has still the mastery over us’ (‘GL’, 15:160). What makes this sudden change of sentiments problematic is the following explanation: ‘She forgot the interval of wrong and jealousy and hatred—all his cruelty, and all her thoughts of revenge—as the exile forgets the stormy passage that lay between home and happiness, and the dreary land in which he finds himself desolate’ (‘GL’, 15:160). Unlike saying this about the more mature Janet who wilfully suppresses her past sufferings to ‘the dark and unfrequented chambers of memory’ (‘JR’, 15:275), to apply such a ‘theory’ of sympathy to the flippant Caterina (at least at this moment) can only suggest that either love comes as easily as it goes or good old oblivion is brought in to make way for the desirable triumph of love so that Caterina may ‘shake off the haunting vision of the past’ (‘GL’, 20:182). Thus the presence of Wybrow, which should bring back a certain degree of short-term memory, does not do so; short-term memory as bona fide knowledge from the past disappears when love needs to be elevated into renewed knowledge from a more remote past despite the fact that such a feeling started as a volatile emotion. This representation unsettles the meaning of the

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

36

37

narrator’s assertion that love is ‘nourished by memories as well as hopes’ and for love ‘perpetual repetition is not a weariness but a want’ (‘GL’, 19:180). A similar tension exists in the sustaining power of Adam Bede’s sufferings. In the first two-thirds of Adam Bede, Hetty’s infanticide as a past event elicits sorrow and disgrace for both Adam and Hetty. Near the end of Chapter 54, there seems to be a message undermining this carefully established link. Before meeting Authur Donnithorn after a lapse of eight years, Adam is no longer confident about standing up to the occasion: ‘memory gets sadly diluted with time, and is not strong enough to revive us’ (AB, 54:363) and ‘no story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather, we who read it are no longer the same interpreters’ (AB, 54:364). Yet one cannot easily take these words, though true, as conclusive: eight years later, ‘Adam could never cease to mourn over that mystery of human sorrow which had been brought so close to him … “Evil’s evil, and sorrow’s sorrow, and you can’t alter it’s natur by wrapping it up in other words”’ (AB, 54:364–5). The narrator quickly glosses over this persistence with a ‘sense of enlarged being’ in Adam’s mind and ‘the initiation into a new state’ (AB, 42:209). Nevertheless, Adam’s keen sense of misery here repeats the process that he goes through in Chapter 48 when he tells Arthur: ‘There’s a sort o’ damage, sir, that can’t be made up for’ (AB, 48:270). The fact that after many years he still has to feel this way suggests that these sufferings may not be redeemable by the cultivation of loving fellow-feelings. Much as he wants to forget events in the past, Adam knows full well how they have etched themselves in the consciousness of his village. Since he has suffered so much, naturally (as the narrator has told us) he finds it impossible to let go of the past, with its ‘stirring’ constantly working on him (AB, 48:267). The strong upbeat note of the final chapters can be justified by the happy ending of Adam’s marriage and the contentment of the gentle folks in the village, yet it leaves important questions unanswered. The loose ends of ‘that mystery of human sorrow’ have lent a melancholy tone to Adam’s joy on his wedding day: ‘There was a tinge of sadness in his deep joy’ (AB, 55:372). His sorrows seem to constitute part of that ‘new state’ that cannot easily be altered, either by words or through time. So Arthur Donnithorne’s wish has been to ‘lessen the evil consequences of the past, which is unchangeable’ (AB, 48:268). The Mill on the Floss also ends on this note of ‘the irretrievable wrong’ (MF, 7:4:448): ‘To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair’ (MF, 7:‘Conclusion’:459). The

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

38

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Pardon? Penitence? When they have done their utmost, still beyond Out of their reach stands Injury unchanged And changeless. (SG, 5:447) However, back in Adam Bede, for the moral triumph to take place in the end, the villagers of Hayslope have to be seen to show their ‘eager interest’ (AB, 55:371) in the marriage of Dinah and Adam, ‘for nothing like Dinah and the history which had brought her and Adam Bede together had been known at Hayslope within the memory of man’ (AB, 55:371). Such memories undoubtedly include Authur Donnithorn and Hetty Sorrel who have to be sacrificed through exile and the Poysers who have to be deeply traumatized. None of them have a chance to rewrite the past. Though referred to, they are marginalized and almost ‘forsaken’ in the final chapters, much in contrast to Adam who is transformed, retrieved and remembered by the fictional narrative. The lingering tone of pathos at the end that emerges from the sentiments of the narrator only proves that no matter how their stories will be rewritten by future generations, something unchangeable will persist in that ‘history of man’. This persistence may, perhaps, in the end become the only force that can lend moral authority to the sharp-tongued wisdom of the countless Mrs Poysers to come. The novel ends happily, but its ending cannot override a narrative of anguish, dilemmas and sufferings that sustains the story’s emotional power. Tragedy after all needs finality to be tragic. Eliot’s exploration into the dialectics between memory as narrative and memory as a link to the ‘immovable roots’ continues throughout her writing career. Her understanding of this issue is well-matched by that of Carlyle, who sees a more intrinsic relationship between narrative and the past when in his ‘On History’ he claims: Our very speech is curiously historical. Most men, you may observe, speak only to narrate; not in imparting what they have thought, which indeed were often a very small matter, but in exhibiting what they have undergone or seen, which is a quite

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

same question is raised again in Silas Marner, when Godfrey Cass asks Nancy Lammeter, ‘would you never think the present made amends for the past?’ (SM, 11:162) and in The Spanish Gypsy, when Don Silva asks rhetorically,

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

39

Carlyle is able to see narrative as shaping a sense of historical reality and at the same time determining its representation. What he describes here is a world of both the subjective and the objective. As Edmund Burke reminds us, we both belong to and act in this world.53 Memory as narrative is often meaningful only when read with reference to its ‘immovable roots’ in the past, physical or otherwise, as a type of historical or experiential ground. Separating the two may make memory seem more coherent and monolithic than it actually is.

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

unlimited one, do talkers dilate … Thus, as we do nothing but enact History, we say little but recite it: nay rather, in that widest sense, our whole spiritual life is built thereon. (WTC, XXVII, 84)

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency in The Lifted Veil, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner

There is a loss and a waste, which can never be repaired, if we lead our lives always facing outwards towards the shared and commonplace business of the world, and always turning our backs on the intimate emotions and perceptions, which are our own peculiar contributions to the sum of human experience. (Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience, pp. 128–9) Personal memory in Eliot is an intersection of narratives of communal memory. She shares the views of several contemporary thinkers on this.1 In her novels, communal values, assumptions and narratives need to be internalized to condition the characters effectively. The process may be carried out consciously, through the intervention of shared feelings in the process of moral conflicts, or more significantly, unconsciously, when the characters are little aware of the collective origins of their feelings. This process may be clarified with the help of Michael Polanyi’s notion of ‘interiorization’ or ‘indwelling’: ‘To interiorize is to identify ourselves with the teachings in question, by making them function as the proximal term of a tacit moral knowledge, as applied in practice. This establishes the tacit framework for our moral acts and judgments.’2 In The Mill on the Floss, the family traditions of the Dodsons and the Tullivers condition the personalities of Tom and Maggie. Maggie inherits the private and introvert Tulliver traits that account for her ‘imaginative and passionate nature’ (MF, 4:2:241), whereas Tom has the Dodson sense of respectability. Facing the same kind of family misfortune, Maggie would take its impact more as guilt than Tom as shame. In Silas Marner, a certain practice 40

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

2

41

passed on through history becomes a sufficient reason why it should be properly observed. The regulatory and disciplinary authority of communal feelings lies not so much in the validity of the assumptions or principles as in the need of compliance with the authority embedded in them. These internalized assumptions from ‘the praiseworthy past’ (MF, 4:1:240) are regarded in her early novels as the ‘irreversible laws’, which, ‘governing the habits, [become] morality and, developing the feelings of submission and dependence, [become] religion’ (MF, 4:3:252). Yet these assumptions are not reducible to laws. While providing enough general tendencies in the eyes of the ‘scientists’, they become what Lionel Trilling calls ‘a culture’s hum and buzz of implication’ or ‘that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unuttered or unutterable expressions of value’.3 Just as to Carlyle, ‘not by material, but by moral power, are men and their actions governed’ (‘Voltaire’, WTC, XXVI, 400), so to Eliot such shared conventions and sentiments may involuntarily and unconsciously condition the rural communities. Yet Eliot’s interest in this internalized dialogic process of ‘interchanging influences’ (M, 40:399), or, in Charles Taylor’s words, ‘a web of interlocution’, also lies in the junctures and disjunctures from which emerge the sense of self and moral agency.4 The focus of The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner is still the Comtean Positivist formulation of ‘[this] permanent conflict between Personality and Sociality’, which Comte believes to be ‘the natural basis of a true general theory of Emotional life’.5 Yet unlike Comte who understands the personal largely in terms of the communal, Eliot calls for the need to recognize and value personal conditions. Unlike Sir Walter Scott who finds the basis of moral authority in collective practice, and unlike William Wordsworth who finds it in personal memory,6 Eliot locates it in the process in which the communal is transformed into the personal: not only the demarcation between the two sides of the conflict but also the change of sides reside within the characters when ‘one shadowy army [fights] another’ (MF, 5:2:271).7 The ‘painful collisions’ (MF, 3:5:206) are rarely between any single individual with a unified moral position and a community as a separate moral system, and they involve the conscious, subconscious and unconscious. The self is never a simple unitary self. It is in this sense that a character’s moral ‘disposition’ may have a considerable implication for his or her decisions. Personal memory in Eliot may thus consist of two aspects: specific internalized communal memories and a totality of such memories

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

understood from a personal perspective. The second aspect is invariably unique to a specific character; it cannot be replaced by, or reduced to, mere internalized communal memories. In the rest of this chapter, for the sake of finer distinction, ‘communal memory’ will be used to refer to the first aspect and ‘personal memory’ to the second. This is to say that communal feelings become personal knowledge only when mediated through and informed by a person’s recollection, both mental and physiological, or rather only when negotiated, contested and understood with reference to the history of specific personalities. The narrator of The Mill on the Floss tells us, ‘we have no master-key that will fit all cases … moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot’ (MF, 7:2:437–8). As Stuart Hampshire has reminded us, ‘we cannot in fact understand a person as a composition of influences’, since the singularity of a person can never be produced by repeating the same composition.8 In this, memory may merge the domains of the personal and the communal, the private and the public. Eliot attempts to call attention to personal memory without severing such memory from many of its collective sources. Her conception of this relationship thus avoids the ‘mode of treatment’ in the later writings of Carlyle which, in T. H. Green’s words, ‘puts personal character in the boldest relief’.9 Consequently, in her early novels, much as internalized communal feelings and, for that matter, narratives constitute the sources of the self, they may not necessarily invalidate the individual basis of moral agency. The real issue is the extent to which a private self may still exist. A particular aspect regarding this issue is shared, in some ways, by the main characters in The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner: the overwhelming influence of internalized communal memory often depletes the characters of moral energy, so they are unable to choose or act; as a result, moral agency can only emerge from the moments when they have sufficient space and time to recapitulate a past unique to themselves, though often with the communal as a system of reference. Exploring the impact of such influence as the main focus of this chapter is not to invalidate the supportive role of community that Eliot tries very hard to establish, but to understand its complexity that cannot be reduced to the epithet ‘supportive’.10 There is always a tension between the overt affirmation of this supportive role and the covert undermining effect of its representation. Such covert effects may be more damaging to the characters’ psyche than the obvious

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

42

43

‘oppressive narrowness’ (MF, 4:1:238) of the fictional communities (gossip, blackmail and so on) that critics have analysed so thoroughly. This is because the ‘supportive’ role and its undermining effect are incorporated into and lend moral power to, each other. The resulting Bildungsroman mode is most trying. It is easy for her readers, both then and now, to take a character’s failure to conform to the communal as alienation; both Latimer in The Lifted Veil and Silas Marner offer good examples in this respect. Yet this view tends to presuppose an invariable autonomy of the personal and a value judgement privileging the communal. The sense of autonomy only pertains to the extent to which the understood totality of internalized communal memories is personal. For this reason, to read the stories of Latimer and Marner as narratives of ‘alienation’ takes the communal as a better-defined opposing entity than it actually is. Again, the self that issues in moral agency does not emerge out of a passive reaction to the communal ‘other’ but takes shape with reference to the communal which helps to constitute but does not completely control personal consciousness. To understand the complexity of these issues, it may be helpful for us to look first at Eliot’s short story The Lifted Veil, to see especially how memory and prevision join forces to drain away Latimer’s passion and energy and to render his self vulnerable at both the conscious and subconscious levels. The word ‘subconscious’ was used in Eliot’s time primarily to mean being partly or imperfectly aware. The terms ‘conscious’, ‘subconscious,’ and ‘unconscious’ were used as separate categories in psychological writings by Lewes and his contemporaries such as J. D. Morell and James Sully. To these ‘scientists’, the differences among the three states were more of degree than of kind. Nevertheless, this distinction brings into relief the exploration of the complex relations of these states in Eliot’s works and anticipate similar interests and concerns of a later age.11

Latimer’s ‘prevision’ and ‘voice’ The Lifted Veil is a story often seen as different from Eliot’s other fictional works. She herself described it as ‘a slight story of an outré kind—not a jeu d’esprit, but a jeu de mélancolie’. Her publisher John Blackwood ‘would strongly advise’ the deletion of ‘the revivifying experiment’ at the end of the story because it was something he did not expect from the author of Adam Bede and he ‘[disliked]’ it. Much as Lewes and Eliot would like to have the author’s name ‘affixed to “Lifted Veil”’, they had to accept the publisher’s suggestion to omit it

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

so that the story’s publication would not ‘fritter away the prestige’ of Eliot.12 What is so unsettling about the story? It is true that Latimer the hero has a morbid personality and that Bertha Grant, his wife, is a generic femme fatale. There are in it also intrigue, attempted murder and fantasy, as Charles Meunier, Latimer’s ‘scientist’ friend, tries to resurrect Mrs Archer, the murdered maid, through blood transfusion. There are, in addition, Latimer’s previsions that are constantly realized – something that causes him persistent distress and melancholy. Why would Eliot write a story like this? The epigraph that she added in 1873 for republication,13 fourteen years after its initial edition, gives us the best clue: ‘Give me no light, great heaven, but such as turns To energy of human fellowship; No powers save the growing heritage That makes completer manhood.’ (Cross,

III,

195)

One might argue, of course, that in 1873, with the hindsight of most of her novels, Eliot was trying to impose a moral framework on the initial ‘slight story’, perhaps too heavy for it to bear. Yet, if we examine the ways in which Latimer’s consciousness is exposed to the outside world, the epigraph becomes most relevant, a relevance reiterated in The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, though tailored there to the lives of individual characters. Latimer is not born morbid. He remembers well his mother’s love. He has longed for human fellowship, which he has been denied. His only means of relating to the outside world is what he calls ‘my double consciousness’ (LV, 2:340): he has constant prevision and is able to read other people’s thoughts. His unfailing ability to anticipate Bertha’s intrigues drives him into despair. This frame of mind, nevertheless, is more existential than circumstantial and has less to do, for instance, with Bertha’s aggressive and selfish nature per se than with the innate conflict between his need for fellowship and the paralysing effect of such company once obtained. His impaired ‘self’ is not the cause but the result of this underlying conflict. Yet in what way is his prevision germane to our discussion of memory and why memory when it strikes Latimer only as ‘stale repetition’ (LV, 1:287)? Recollecting a series of previsions is the backbone of his sense of being. The story is structured on such recollection.14 These previsions themselves also consist of recollected visions, enabling him to see, from

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

44

45

the present point of view, both a past present and a past future. In addition, every moment at which a prevision is realized entails not only recognition but also recollection. Recollecting becomes the narrative mode in which Latimer remains conscious of the continuity of events. Not surprisingly, the narrative beginning of the story is its chronological ending and the use of flashbacks becomes imperative. His recollection ushers in the beginning of his own death, another long familiar sight already anticipated in his prevision. Everything becomes déjà vu; the date on which he dies, which has just been written, looks as if it were ‘a long familiar inscription’ (LV, 2:341). In recollection as in prevision, his consciousness is constantly exposed to other people’s thoughts. Latimer provides a unique vocabulary to describe how internalized external conditions may upset one’s mental balance. He longs for a ‘community of feeling’ (LV, 1:285) but uses the epithet ‘diseased’ for his ‘participation in other people’s consciousness’ (LV, 1:301). To what extent is this ‘participation’ true human interaction? ‘In The Lifted Veil’, observes Gillian Beer, ‘insight is intransitive. There is no replenishing reciprocity between Latimer and the world.’15 Latimer keeps his insights to himself. Yet, his susceptibility to, and participation in others’ consciousness seem to suggest a degree of reciprocity. Bertha’s face evokes in Latimer a perverse subconscious need for self-affliction, perhaps more so because he knows that she enjoys inflicting pain on him while he feels powerless to put an end to this agony. In the first few flashbacks, Bertha’s dominance, partly caused by Latimer’s fascination with her, diminishes his sense of existence. Being able to foresee her mind has ‘helped to intoxicate me’ but it is also ‘a delicious torment’ (LV, 1:300) with ‘the novelty and intensity of the pleasures and pains I underwent’ (LV, 1:301). His ‘involuntary intrusion’ (LV, 1:301) is often self-invasive: instead of actively reaching out, or positively receiving, his insights are constantly ‘assaulted’ by external consciousness. Envisaging Bertha ‘entering’, he shudders: ‘I felt helpless before her, as if she clutched my bleeding heart and would clutch it till the last drop of life-blood ebbed away’ (LV, 1:304). He feels Bertha’s ‘pitiless soul … [clothes] me round like an air I was obliged to breathe’ (LV, 1:304). No wonder his pride ‘winced’ at his brother’s ‘small patronising ways’ (LV, 1:305) as an ‘offence’ and ‘an intruding mote’ (LV, 1:306). One might argue that his relationship with Bertha is meant to show only their opposite personalities: a ‘spirit of intrigue’ versus ‘a poetic passion’ (LV, 1:298). Yet such opposites are not the main significance of the metaphors. What gets across is a sense of

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

futility and impotence in intoxication: ‘this warm-breathing presence again possessed my senses and imagination like a returning syren melody’ (LV, 2:314). The internalized pressure is best seen in the fact that, for most of the time, he understands himself in external terms. When he calls his sensibility ‘my diseased sensibility’ (LV, 1:305), ‘diseased’ shows his own inscription of what he himself would have been thought of by others. If his prevision is ‘this hideous vision’ (LV, 1:305), the implied reason behind the epithet is ambiguous; the word ‘hideous’ may describe, respectively, Bertha, the (re)visitation of his vision and having a vision at all. In the end, it must be hideous from any point of view not to be able to get out of his mental impasse. Such a double consciousness bothers Latimer, as he loathes his ‘old insight’ and ‘the curse of insight’ (LV, 2:340). The real power of his constant recollection lies in its ability to reach the subconscious, interwoven with the threatening consciousness of others in his previsions. It is a process not completely accessible to his conscious mind, something he can intuitively but only vaguely tell that is bothering him. Recurrence is the key; without such ‘reproduction of past states of Consciousness’, memory would have become what to W. B. Carpenter is ‘the succession of fantasies’.16 A recollected or reminded insight is worse than a new insight. It is tantamount to a retrogression much against his own will to avoid it. Each recollection becomes a renewed assault, creating new wounds by opening old ones. It is, therefore, more powerful and damaging than just prevision. Conversely, the significance of his recollection accrues in the content, sequence and intensity of his prevision. Scenes such as that of Bertha holding the candle walking in with the emerald brooch ‘recurred constantly, with all its minutiae, as if they had been burnt into my memory’ (LV, 1:305). He dreads when ‘the recollections of the past become contracted in the rapidity of thought’ till they bear no more resemblance to ‘the external reality than the forms of an oriental alphabet to the objects that suggested them’ (LV, 2:328–9). Latimer finds memory of other people’s ‘invasive’ consciousness threatening as it presents a past that has supposedly taken place; in contrast, vision or prevision, by definition, only shows what is yet to happen and, until it happens, lacks the certainty of recalled ‘reality’. He knows the distinction well: ‘The future, even when brought within the compass of feeling by a vision that made me shudder, had still no more than the force of an idea’ (LV, 1:306) and ‘this last hideous glimpse of the future was the mere diseased play of my own mind, and had no relation to external realities’ (LV, 1:305). Yet when repeated

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

46

47

prevision forces him to recall the dreadful reality of experiencing that prevision, he longs, though subconsciously, for preventing such prevision from becoming reality. Just as memory can provide imagery and structure for a new vision – his mind ‘was full of German lyrics’ (LV, 1:291) which help him to see Bertha as ‘the daughter of an aged river’ (LV, 1:291) before she appears on the scene – so vision depends on future recollection to be reinstated as reality of the present, which accounts for his obsession with verifying his remembered visions. This is why during their family’s visit in Prague, Latimer chooses to leave the party to walk home after they have been to the Jewish quarter. He wants to confirm a detail almost subconsciously retained from his vision to end the suspense: ‘I was in search of something—a small detail which I remembered with special intensity as part of my vision’ (LV, 1:309). The confirmation adds to his fear that his previsions in the future, no matter what dreadful prospect they may bring, are destined to be realized. Here we can detect the Wordsworthian convention of confirming the imaginative by the real, yet it is given a dark twist as both imagination and reality are bound by memory.17 Remembered prevision becomes the source and cause of his distress. Hayden White, in a different context, describes ‘a seizing of a past by consciousness in such a way as to make of the present a fulfillment … rather than merely an effect’.18 For Latimer, though, such a present is not only an effect of the past, a fulfilment confirming that the future will be certain, but also a destiny. It keeps alive his visionary ability well beyond his wish and control. In synthesizing recollection and prevision and in merging the conscious with the subconscious, he collapses the boundaries between a remembered past and a future realized as the present. The connection that Gillian Beer makes between ‘replenishing’ and ‘reciprocity’ is most instructive here, for the seeming ‘reciprocity’ in Latimer’s mind is hardly beneficial to his moral being. While intensifying his imagination, it depletes all his emotional and moral strength. He wants to idealize his childhood which ‘perhaps seems happier to me than it really was’: ‘For then the curtain of the future was as impenetrable to me as to other children’ (LV, 1:280). He agonizes over losing ‘that unequalled love’ from his mother which ‘soon vanished out of my life’ (LV, 1:280). He can only come to the stark conclusion that not only ‘my nature was of the sensitive, unpractical order’, but ‘it grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could never foster it into happy, healthy development’ (LV, 1:283–4). Bertha’s is the last company that Latimer needs, precisely because he

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

‘perpetually [craves] sympathy and support’ (LV, 1:297). In the ‘denouement’, memory throws much emotional weight upon his resentment of Bertha: ‘I remember—how should I not remember?— the time when that dependence and hope utterly left me’ (LV, 2:322). As a result, his inclination to extend sympathy to others is forced to close in further on himself. The lack of ‘replenishing’ reciprocity drives him towards a sense of self that hardly has any autonomy, since there is little recollection of choice and growth. In the end, it is only by jettisoning much of his personal memory and thus the continuity of his consciousness that he becomes more sympathetic to ‘every living thing’ that is ‘surrounded with possibilities of misery’ (LV, 2:331). The sympathy is awakened by a reminder of his pre-Bertha days – Charles Meunier’s letter ‘expressed that keen remembrance of an early regard … which is inseparable from nobility of character’ (LV, 2:331). Gaining such sympathy thus presupposes the loss of an internalized consciousness of trauma, which has paralysed his ability to articulate his self.19 Not surprisingly, the story ends on a poignant and elegiac note. The moment at which Latimer is stirred by the need to voice his self is the very moment at which he is losing his clairvoyance into other consciousnesses: ‘All that was personal in me seemed to be suffering a gradual death, so that I was losing the organ through which the personal agitations and projects of others could affect me’ (LV, 2:329). His identity is truncated not by the lack of other human presence in his consciousness but by the destructive action of such consciousness finally coming to an end. He is ‘entirely free from insight, from [his] abnormal cognisance of any other consciousness than [his] own and instead of intruding involuntarily into the world of other minds, was living continually in [his] own solitary future’ (LV, 2:330). The firstperson narrative of recollection has all along maintained his voice; his mode of telling externalizes a need to open up and to resist desperately any enclosure: ‘telling the strange story of my experience’ and ‘fully [unbosoming] myself to any human being’ (LV, 1:278). The impotence and agony of losing a personal voice may be better understood if we see him as the ‘alter ego’ of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Latimer believes that he ‘was held to have a sort of half-womanish, half-ghostly beauty’ (LV, 1:295); this in large part anticipates Ganymede, that ‘girlishly handsome precocious youth’ in the essay ‘So Young!’ in Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such, a collection of eighteen loosely connected essays (ITS, 177). What makes Gray different from Latimer is that while Gray’s sense of self depends on the

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

48

49

manifestations of the image (picture) that Basil Hallward has painted for him, Latimer’s depends on the efficacy of his own voice. Latimer admits that the portrait-painters have asked him to sit as ‘the model of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture’ (LV, 1:295). The picture, though fanciful to his eyes, does not become truly fanciful until it is redefined, in the same way as with Gray, by the reality of Latimer’s life. What emerges is a paradox that empties the minstrel image of its essential identifying feature of singing: silent not because he is not supposed to sing given its identifying image, but because the loss of Latimer’s personal memory in the end metaphorically deprives the minstrel image-persona of its ability to find a voice, to tether itself to a voice, let alone to sound through the image-mask. Latimer’s silence symbolically completes the fantastic nature of the picture by relegating the minstrel image forever to the realm of imagination. In the end, Latimer’s sensations cannot be articulated as thought. For all his newly felt sympathy, he has only ‘the poet’s sensibility without his voice—the poet’s sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears on the sunny bank’ (LV, 1:284). The irony remains: only by losing his voice does he come to feel the agitations of a self within him; yet now that he no longer has a voice, there is no way to articulate such agitations. The loss of personal memory leads to the loss of voice, which signifies the loss of self as a potential moral agent.

Maggie Tulliver’s ‘ties’ and ‘roots’ If Latimer internalizes other consciousnesses as a result of his unwanted ‘talent’ of prevision, Maggie Tulliver internalizes shared values and feelings because this is a way of life into which she is born. Her life manifests how memories, both personal and communal, may interact with each other and generate ambiguities of moral agency. The communal is essential in Eliot’s understanding of how childhood memories may acquire meanings. If the Wordsworthian love for childhood and home finds a parallel in both The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, it is the collective scope that marks the difference between Eliot and Wordsworth since his focus is primarily on the personal and the individual. Nevertheless, the collective scope has also made Eliot’s treatment of childhood experience paradoxically Wordsworthian. In Wordsworth, as Paul Hamilton has observed, ‘Indeterminacy of meaning in the spots of time … cleverly keeps the expression of childhood experience free of hindsight, while linking it to maturer efforts to create a significant environment’.20 Likewise, in The Mill on the

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Floss, childhood memory is deliberately made a moment that initiates some tendency for future understanding, but not for any specific meaning. ‘Childhood’, she wrote to Sara Sophia Hennell about sixteen years before in March 1844, ‘is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown’ (Cross, I, 126). But in The Mill on the Floss, the point of realizing this is to see that ultimately personal memory will be given a meaning by one’s changing life in a collective milieu: ‘Every one of those keen moments has left its trace and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood’ (MF, 1:7:57). When Maggie faces ‘the great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty’ (MF, 7:2:437), the internalized communal feelings are more powerful than the invasive consciousness that Latimer has to sustain because they have a higher moral claim and are harder to resist. How much do these internalized feelings stand for those of the community and how much for Maggie’s own? Blurring their boundaries creates ambiguities for self-knowledge and interpretation and calls into question the basis of Eliot’s characters as moral agents. Rarely do we get a satisfactory distinction between what Stuart Hampshire calls the ‘one universal moral requirement that touches conceptions of the good’ and ‘the singularity of persons, the individual essence’.21 Maggie’s personal memory becomes problematic when it is silently encroached upon by the collective. While the personal and the communal are clearly demarcated in the consciousness of Tito in Romola in order that they may be seen to be at strife, Maggie often ends up meaning the communal when the personal is referred to and vice versa. The slippery and ambiguous nature of the first-person ‘we’ and ‘I’ is best illustrated in the following scene where Maggie tries to reason with Stephen that they should not pursue their ‘love’ for each other. This is one of the few moments where she uses ‘I’ to pronounce on an issue tremendously important to her: ‘O it is difficult—life is very difficult! It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling;—but then, such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us—the ties that have made others dependent on us—and would cut them in two … But I see—I feel it is not so now … that I must not, cannot, seek my own happiness by sacrificing others.’ (MF, 6:11:395)

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

50

51

Here ‘we’ can refer to both ‘I’ and a communal and almost universal ‘we’ that includes everyone. ‘We’ can also mean just Maggie and Stephen, but the ‘I’ near the end is a moralized ‘I’, aligning itself with, if not appropriating, the communal as the universal. When Tom appeals to her moral sense as ‘your natural feelings of gratitude and honour’ (MF, 7:1:427), these ‘feelings’ mean more a shared culture than a personal disposition. Again, when Maggie argues for renouncing the moment ‘for the sake of obeying the divine voice within us—for the sake of being true to all the motives that sanctify our lives’ (MF, 6:14:418–9), the viewpoint of ‘we’ takes priority over that of ‘I’, though seemingly representing it. She is transformed from someone with a reasonable degree of freedom for moral deliberation into someone who subconsciously and unconsciously subscribes to the communal.22 This internalization is particularly evident when Maggie reflects on the incident of sailing down the river with Stephen and comes to recognize ‘the sense of contradiction with her past self in her moments of strength and clearness’ (MF, 7:5:453). What is this ‘past self’ then? A few lines over, the narrator adds, ‘the long past came back to her and with it the fountains of self-renouncing pity and affection, of faithfulness and resolve’ (MF, 7:5:453). This ‘long past’ here means essentially a morally selected past, obliterating her undesirable ‘past self’ of passion and need. For the narrator, only in this way can communal memory be seen as personal. Yet, if to Maggie ‘the real tie lies in the feelings and expectations we have raised in other minds’ (MF, 6:11:394), the metaphor of ‘tie’ is hardly sufficient, for instead of connecting Maggie to something else, it is transformed to become part of her, the internalized ‘roots’. When he comments on Maggie’s ‘elopement’ with Stephen, Philip Wakem highlights the issue without knowing it: ‘the strong attraction which drew you together proceeded only from one side of your characters, and belonged to that partial, divided action of our nature which makes half the tragedy of the human lot’ (MF, 7:3:442), implying thereby that the other morally more responsible side of Maggie is by no means, while it should be, instinctive. This blurring of boundaries conditions the meaning of a range of notions such as ‘past’, ‘memory’ and ‘yesterday’. By Chapter 14 of Book VI, hardly any validity is given to Maggie’s long-held ardent desires. Her past as the internalized communal also becomes constricting: ‘The yesterday, which could never be revoked’; ‘her past life was grasping her in this way’ (MF, 6:14:413). Because of this, it becomes

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

problematic when the narrator describes in real earnest Stephen’s ‘uneasy consciousness that he had robbed her of perfect freedom yesterday’ (MF, 6:14:414). What exactly does this freedom mean? What can Maggie be free from? – certainly not from communal feelings and ‘insights’ given their constrictive nature. Then in what way can such ‘freedom’ be ‘perfect’? Being able to decide to do whatever one wants? The narratorial message becomes clear by now that such freedom should not exist. The narrator tries to maintain a distance from the illusion of freedom by attributing it to Stephen’s ‘too much native honour in him’. Nevertheless, when Maggie is ‘too conscious of fatal weakness in herself’ (MF, 6:14:414) and then declares, after she and Stephen have reached Mudport, that ‘I will not begin any future . . . with a deliberate consent to what ought not to have been’ (MF, 6:14:416), the internalized communal is in full action. She may be conscious of her own fatal weakness, but the ‘I’ who has yet to begin a future remains mostly a communal ‘I’. It is with regard to this ‘I’ that we should examine a few central metaphors used frequently for communal support. These metaphors recommend as much a way of describing the collective ‘milieu’ as of understanding it. When the supportive capacity of the ‘environment’ is affirmed as dependability, advice, care and benevolence, Maggie does believe in its efficacy; yet the metaphorical and contextual resonance often carries within itself an integral backlash that thwarts personal aspirations. The most ambiguous metaphor is that of ‘binding’. It brings out the double-edged nature of communal memory, both as necessary attachment and as inevitable constraint.23 In the same way, Maggie’s past life becomes a ‘tightening clutch’ when she has to make a moral choice (MF, 6:14:413). ‘There are memories, and affections . . . that have such a strong hold on me’ (MF, 6:14:418). Maggie’s reliance on the communal becomes a reliance on an idea of it. On the other hand, the constraining overtone recalls a passage from William Lecky’s The Influence of Rationalism that Eliot read: ‘it is the special evil of intolerance that it entwines itself around the holiest parts of our nature, and becomes at last so blended with the sense of duty’ (GEN, II, 157, n. 3). Furthermore, the ‘social’ in the Victorian period is said to ‘[continue] to be governed by a self uneasy about a social [sic] progressively becoming not just a system, but a kingdom of its own, with its own rules in which the responsibility once exercised by the self was becoming subordinated’.24 Spinoza’s ‘spirit of tolerance’, particularly his opposition to social and religious factionalism, had a great influence on Eliot.25 Since she did accept the Comtean

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

52

53

idea of determinism, she could have been equally concerned with the inertia of the primitive nature of the collective that prevents itself as a form of knowledge from evolving into the polytheist stage. This ambiguous position about communal support, however, invests new meanings into other metaphors. It also renders the metaphors of ‘uprooting’ and ‘deep immovable roots in memory’ (MF, 2:1:133) double-edged. The metaphor of roots is predicated on the ‘tree’ metaphor, by which St Ogg’s is described. The town impresses one as ‘a continuation and outgrowth of nature … a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history like a millennial tree … It is a town “familiar with forgotten years”’ (MF, 1:12:101). The Wordsworthian phrase at the end of the quotation indicates, indirectly, that in ‘roots’ the sense of what lies below the surface symbolizes the unconscious acceptance of the communal. Nevertheless, the implied constraints in the other metaphors discussed above also deflect this sense from what the roots are there for: attaching the trunk or branches to the earth, supporting them, conveying nourishment in the course of growing. They release an undercurrent of thought as if justifying a severance from one’s moral resource. But this is not to deny that, despite this tension, the dominant message remains ‘that the light abandonment of ties, whether inherited or voluntary, because they had ceased to be pleasant, was the uprooting of social and personal virtue’ (R, 56:474). However, if the communal becomes one’s ‘root of piety’ (‘Brother and Sister’, CP, 87), then the question remains as to how far an individual can act out of his or her own initiative or make his or her own decision. This question becomes the most significant challenge to the novel’s explicit moral teachings. Maggie’s unconventional behaviour is often seen by critics as a sign of her rebellious self, a rupture in the moral framework that implicitly allows for it. But this is a more complicated issue. In Maggie’s subconscious we get a glimpse of what is not easily subsumed into a past ‘self’ desirable only to an authorial moral agenda. Yet how far is that ‘individual experience’ a real breakthrough? Before she is ‘Borne Along by the Tide’, Maggie is immersed in an intense mental struggle. When she is led down the river to the boat and sails away with Stephen, we see a suspension of her moral awareness; her action also deviates from Eliot’s usual position that ‘Feeling Is Energy’ (E, 450). And they went. Maggie felt that she was being led down the garden among the roses, being helped with firm tender care into the boat,

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

having the cushion and cloak arranged for her feet and her parasol opened for her (which she had forgotten)—all by this stronger presence that seemed to bear her along without any act of her own will, like the added self which comes with the sudden exalting influence of a strong tonic—and she felt nothing else. Memory was excluded. (MF, 6:13:407) The careful building-up before the paragraph creates an aura, a dreamy vertigo, in which the characters do not have their usual consciousness of being themselves. The rhythm there is one of the slowest in the narration. The pondering progression of the narrative deliberately anticipates an impending event, the long-awaited decision from Maggie: to go or not to go. The moment, however, never comes. Maggie does go with Stephen; but in contrast to pages of inner struggles, she leaves within a seven-line paragraph. In a fraction of a second, she ‘was being led down the garden’, ‘being helped with firm tender care’, ‘having the cushion arranged for her feet’. The syntactic movement is entirely dominated by the passive voice which tends to efface the agent of the action and by the present participles which help to dramatize the urgency of a succession of actions. One would assume that the syntactical passiveness signals a moral passiveness, a lack of full consciousness. Up to this point, the reader’s attention has been directed to the sequence of the action when the narrator unexpectedly, though parenthetically, or, rather, emphatically, intrudes with the clause, ‘which she had forgotten’.26 This climatic intrusion brings the sequence to a sudden stop, only to be resumed and recapitulated across a dash that announces the agent – not Maggie – but the impersonal ‘this strong presence’ that seems to bear her along. It is only a ‘presence’, not a distinct image of any person; it only ‘seemed to bear her along’, but not really. It is ‘like the added self’ and ‘she felt nothing else’. The diction here denotes Maggie’s mental state, a swirling semi-consciousness. The narrator seems still too worried that the reader may not notice this and cannot but exclaim ‘[it was] without any act of her own will’. Not quite willing to end just there, the narrator eventually concludes at the end of the paragraph – a place normally reserved for emphasis: ‘Memory was excluded’. On this short paragraph of a long chapter, and the most important paragraph at that, hinges the immediately preceding and subsequent narration. The paragraph is most crucial for an understanding of Maggie’s moral agency: it is not a conscious choice and perhaps not a choice at all. Only at this point do internalized commu-

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

54

55

nal feelings, which have accompanied her both before and after the event, supposedly loosen their grip. The passive voice forms a sharp contrast to the active sense of the following chapter heading, ‘Waking’. The contrast is reinforced by Maggie’s own remarks to Stephen: ‘You have wanted to deprive me of any choice. You knew we were come too far’ (MF, 6:13:409). ‘I have never consented to it with my whole mind’ (MF, 6:14:418). Maggie’s accusation suggests that this moment is for her the absence of moral choice. In this instance, what Lewes calls the ‘moral causation’ as different from ‘physical causation’ (SP, 107) at best retreats to the subconscious, if not the unconscious. It is in this context that we should understand the narratorial comment: ‘She had reproached him for being hurried into irrevocable trespass—she, who had been so weak herself’ (MF, 6:13:409). This moment recalls Latimer’s similar weakness at the invasion of external consciousness. However, can we rely on such a reading? Is Eliot able to exclude such a moment, which is psychologically passive, mentally subconscious and supposedly devoid of one’s own will, from the realm of moral agency? In the subsequent chapter ‘Waking’, Maggie’s thought about the incident is described through the voice of the narrator in terms of ‘the wayward choice of her own passion’, ‘a choice of the lower’, ‘a choice … of conscious cruelty and hardness’ (MF, 6:14:413). Maggie’s acquiescence may imply partial awareness, though not necessarily full consciousness, yet the subconscious here is treated as having the same power of leading to moral action as the conscious realm. The question is: does relegating the subconscious to a moral realm make her action a moral decision? To gauge accurately the authorial perspective on this issue, we need to avoid confining our thinking to just the question of conscious intention or decision. This is no longer a matter of whether moral agency does or does not depend on conscious choice. Maggie is not exactly like Latimer; there is physical action in her case, a coalescence of Lewes’s ‘moral causation’ and ‘physical causation’. When her conscious memory is absent, the subconscious allows bodily memory to ‘spring into action’, fulfilling her pent-up longing to follow her own passion and instincts. This recalls Lewes’s use of the ‘palimpsest’ metaphor for the effects of a series of recollections on the ‘sensitive subject’ (FC, I, 162). The significance of Lewes’s metaphor lies in the residue of previous memory: personal memory may override the imprint or imposition of communal memory. This is a ‘bodily’ memory in the sense that what Maggie does obeys the order of her

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

‘physical causation’. Certain needs in Maggie’s subconscious can thus be answered by activating this unconscious bodily memory. As Bergson puts it, ‘These memories, messengers from the unconscious, remind us of what we are dragging behind us unawares’.27 The following quotation plays, again, on this ambiguous sense of the absence of memory. Here Maggie complies with Stephen’s request for her to get up so that he may ‘raise the cloak over [her] shoulder’: ‘Maggie was hardly conscious of having said or done anything decisive. All yielding is attended with a less vivid consciousness than resistance; it is the partial sleep of thought; it is the submergence of our own personality by another’ (MF, 6:13:410). In this case, ‘it is this body’, to borrow Edward S. Casey’s formulation, ‘as actually felt in casual efficacy that gives to it its seminal importance in matters of memory’.28 It appears that to the narrator, when the subconscious allows for the unconscious bodily memory to be reinstated, mental passiveness has moral implications. For this reason, both the subconscious and the unconscious are treated in the same way as a fully conscious moral decision.29 A moment immediately after the incident is a case in point. Maggie manages to struggle away from Stephen’s expression of passion and leaves him in despair: ‘Maggie was not conscious of a decision as she turned away from that gloomy averted face, and walked out of the room: it was like an automatic action that fulfils a forgotten intention’ (MF, 6:14:420). Her consciousness is hardly present if her action is ‘automatic’; yet the bodily movements may have resulted from ‘a forgotten intention’. A plausible explanation seems to be that Maggie has submerged herself so totally in the new moral paradigm that she acts automatically – no doubt a sign of the successful dominance of communal insights. As in the river bank scene, the implied presence of unconscious forces at this moment is meant to suggest not only the latent function of a previous mental state, but also a capacity in the unconscious for action and perhaps judgement. Around the 1840s, there existed two distinctive explanations of the sources of unconscious forces. The first explanation consisted of a number of views that all attributed such forces to irrational sources, be it the Kantian noumena, God, or an unknown mental state. The second, rising against and predominating over the first view, was J.S. Mill’s radical conception of ‘a rational unconscious mind’, according to which, summarizes Edward S. Reed, ‘there are non-conscious mental processes which are identical with, or at least resemble, the process of drawing inferences and making judgements’.30 Eliot’s representation could have drawn on both of these explanations.

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

56

57

The connection thus established between the subconscious, the unconscious and moral degeneration is striking. Eliot’s treatment of subconscious and unconscious moments is important to our understanding of how she conceives of the power of memory. Unlike E. S. Dallas, a former student of Sir William Hamilton and proponent of ‘the science of criticism’, who believed that memory ‘belongs even more to the unconscious than to the conscious mind’ as it preserves things ‘beyond our knowledge and without our understanding’,31 Eliot thinks that such power belongs to their interactions and only this mnemonic power can make both morally meaningful. Moral agency, seemingly absent, is only hidden but fully in action in subconscious and unconscious terms. In this, Eliot differs from Lewes. She seems to have a stronger conviction than Lewes does as to how ‘[while] obeying the prevailing impulse, we are conscious and subconscious of simultaneous solicitations in different directions’ (SP, 104–5; see also 150–1). The narratorial insistence on taking bodily memory as conducive to moral action perhaps accounts for Eliot’s objection to Lewes’s using the word ‘lapse’ to describe subconscious actions.32 It is not surprising that each time Maggie forgets her present situation and returns to childhood memory, trouble knocks at her door, which usually leads to a diminished sense of moral responsibility. The moment when ‘Maggie quite forgot her troublous life in a childlike enjoyment of that half-rustic rhythm which seems to banish pretentious etiquette’ (MF, 6:10:386), Stephen happens to make his advances. However, Eliot’s interest in personal memory goes well beyond merely moralizing the subconscious or the unconscious. She recognizes the need as much for personal internalization of collective insights as for personal memory to remain a private experience. The representation of the characters can reveal the continuity of their consciousness as a link to a personal, especially childhood, past that does not always measure itself according to the moral imperatives of the communal. When their personal memory is defined and organized by their own ‘field of personal experience’ (PLM3, 116; original emphasis), these characters may sometimes be able to become themselves and to take moral positions with sufficient consciousness. Personal memories in the form of Wordsworthian ‘spots of time’ can remain, to quote from Eliot’s poem ‘I Grant You Ample Leave’, ‘a shifting otherness’, a ‘Phantasmal flux of moments’, or ‘the core, the centre of your consciousness’ (CP, 185). As telling signs of ‘the mystery that lies under the processes’ (Cross, II, 148), without which

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

‘the end of our lives will have nothing in it like the beginning’ (MF, 3:6:209), these moments illustrate an individual’s recollection that is hardly shared by other characters and yet remains meaningful to a ‘blended life’ (SG, 1:307). The immediacy and energy in ‘an intimate penetration’ and ‘a revived consciousness’ (MF, 1:7:58) that accompany these moments of recollection further define this personal memory. In 1876, sixteen years after The Mill on the Floss was published, Eliot wrote to Dr Joseph Frank Payne that she became ‘more and more timid—with less daring to adopt any formula which does not get itself clothed for [her] in some human figure and individual experience’ (L, VI, 216–17). This thought had already appeared in The Mill on the Floss. Personal memory as the understood totality of internalized memories is the moving force behind the plot: almost every major character is relentlessly pursued by memory – for example, Maggie by her friendship and love for Philip, Tom by that relationship and his father’s grudge against Wakem, Maggie by her father’s death and her oath before Tom not to see Philip any more, Maggie by her resignation which is always mingled with desire and Tom by his own desire which leads to his distrust of Maggie. After the family loses its fortune to the bailiffs, Tom withdraws into himself to survive. It is determination, humiliation and expectation that forge in him a new identity, shaped by family tradition but sustained by his own will. Whenever she ‘slips’ into memories not sanctioned by the communal, Maggie may interpret them beyond the terms set by the paralysing pressure of the communal. It is only in this sense that we should understand the moral overtones of memory being a private chamber, as ‘an opening in the rocky wall which shut in the narrow valley of humiliation’ (MF, 5:3:285) or as ‘a sweet relief’ (MF, 5:4:295). Childhood memory becomes a relief because it is not always subject to the same commitment and judgement that one acquires as an adult. It is full of secrecy and longing because it is safe, reclusive and can be revisited at will; it is supposedly safe also because one does not have to regard it as reality, knowing full well that it is derived from reality: Maggie tells Philip, ‘I have made up my mind—it is right that we should give each other up, in everything but memory’ (MF, 5:3:286). Her attitude parallels Feuerbach’s belief in how feeling inextricably belongs to one’s essential being.33 Yet equally important, this former self will not absolve Maggie of the consequences of present thinking. She can’t help assuming that Philip would argue back that ‘it is other people’s wrong feelings that make concealment necessary’ (MF, 5:3:286). She

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

58

59

knows very well that such an escape becomes an escape precisely because it is a position taken in the larger ‘field’ of communal values. The lack of external moral intervention is only relative. Only by connecting a moment in her present with a personal past is she able to maintain her orientation which paradoxically releases her from the constant need to confront or deny the internalized communal within her.34 If The Mill on the Floss seems to suggest here and there that internalized communal memories should override the personal memories of Tom and Maggie, its ending sends us a most powerful message, contrary to the critical view that sees the ending as an impasse for resolving the plot: when the flood is about to ‘swallow’ them both, Tom reverses to his childhood address to Maggie as ‘Magsie’. In a moment of life and death, he returns, much out of his own choosing, not to his childhood itself, supposedly ‘a sort of sacred place, a sanctuary’ (MF, 6:7:361) with much less pressure of the ‘burden’ of duty, but to his connection with that childhood past, from the present moment of peril, which locates him in relation to Maggie and to his own entire adult life.

Marner’s ‘web’ and ‘chasm’ If Maggie’s sense of self is ‘bound’ and ‘tied’ by and ‘rooted’ in, communal memories, then to what extent can Marner ‘the Weaver’35 weave a self out of his life in the ‘neighbourly’ (SM, 10:120) village of Raveloe? This metaphor of web best embodies Eliot’s idea that personal memory is constituted through internalized shared feelings, as it evokes the Darwinian ‘web’ of affinities and progeny. It can also symbolize the mode of both the Comtean formative function of society and the Carlylean natural ‘governing’ of historical life. The metaphorical potential is further demonstrated in such related Carlylean metaphors as the web-like spreading of disease or ‘Organic Filaments’ (WTC, I, 194) which is used in Sartor Resartus to describe a society held together by language, custom, climate, and so on. The web metaphor in Lewes’s formulation of the physiological subject in his Foundations of a Creed further indicates its dual function: ‘The Present is to him a complex web, with threads of the Past and threads of the Future inextricably interwoven’ (FC, II, 123). Essentially a synchronic metaphor, such a ‘web’ can have its diachronic application as well. In addition, ‘for Victorian people, woven fabric seems to have been the predominant reference’,36 rather than the spider’s web. For this reason, in spite of its resonance of a trapping device of ‘small social

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

conditions and their frustrating complexity’ (M, 18:176), the metaphor can also suggest solidarity, communion and the capability of extending itself continuously. Eliot’s Gemeinschaft novels abound in such metaphors: ‘fibres of their hearts’ (MF, 4:1:238), ‘a sufficiently subtle moral fibre’ (AB, 5:98), ‘the threads of ordinary association’ (MF, 7:5:455), ‘the long-winding fibres of your memory’ (AB, 50:311), the ‘tissue of vague dreams’ or ‘all the threads of thought and emotion . . . absorbed in the woof of her actual daily life’ (MF, 5:4:296). The emphasis on the interwoven state of relations tends to give way to one on the action of morally weaving into the ‘woof’ of the whole web of communal feelings. Only in doing so can a character come to claim his or her affinity and become ‘neighbourly’ (SM, 10:121). The metaphorical intersection of these diachronic and synchronic meanings is where Marner comes into contact with the Raveloe village life. His handicraft helps to change his ‘eccentric habits which belong to a state of loneliness’ (SM, 1:5). The supportive function of such a web ‘environment’, symptomatic of Eliot’s nostalgia for ‘the remedial influences of pure, natural human relations’ (Cross, II, 290), is again Wordsworthian, as she praises the uncorrupted existence of countrymen and laments the destruction of a mode of organic life missing in the modern world. The web, though it hangs on nothing, appears to have become the anchorage of Marner’s life. Its meaning is defined by its latency and promise. Hope seems to be high for Marner of getting the consolatory remedial fellow-feelings that Latimer has been denied and that Marner himself could not get in Lantern Yard. Yet to what extent can the ‘web’ truly support and sustain him? Eliot’s awareness of the ambiguities of village support is more sophisticated and subtle here than in either Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss. She tackles the difficulty of accepting the communal past as a support while at the same time recognizing its limited capacity.37 Marner represents those displaced city-dwellers who roam the villages for work. It is with these ‘remnants of a disinherited race’ (SM, 1:3) and their lack of affinity with local communities that the novel begins: ‘No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin’ (SM, 1:4). A more immediate reason for his displacement, however, is that the church assembly in Lantern Yard promises no justice when he has been framed up. Marner offers a very intricate case, for being displaced from his original community has positioned him to merge into another supposedly more friendly one. Severance here becomes primary and vital for the possibility of developing fellowship. What kind of community has he moved to then? In

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

60

61

Raveloe, the villagers initially regard ‘emigrants from the town into the country’ as aliens (SM, 1:4–5). Of all the major characters in Eliot’s novels, Marner, as an outcast from an Evangelical community, seems to be the one whose psyche is damaged most. Correspondingly, the healing power of natural relations should have been the most desirable and its effects the easiest to show. Yet Marner’s dealings with the villagers are never simply a matter of his losing faith in God and finding religious communion in them. Their mentality is limited though not unsympathetic: ‘the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery’ (SM, 1:4). Superstition seems to be the prevailing mode of understanding and they lack ‘any enthusiastic religious faith’ (SM, 1:6). The narrator’s sense of humour accentuates the ‘neighbourly’ side of such a life – a humour that is tantamount to a peculiar way of admiration: for the villagers, ‘[going] to church every Sunday in the calendar would have shown a greedy desire to stand well with Heaven, and get an undue advantage over their neighbours’ (SM, 10:122). The villagers’ initial contact with Marner intimates a sense of uncomfortable encroachment. It is simplistic to say that since he prefers to keep everything to himself, he would find any sympathetic response invasive. Mr Macey wants him to ‘come to church’ so as to be ‘a bit neighbourly’ (SM, 10:121). When she is aware of Marner’s isolation, it is Dolly Winthrop’s nature ‘to seek out all the sadder and more serious elements of life, and pasture her mind upon them’ (SM, 1:123). A significant distinction arises when it is not Dolly Winthrop, nor other villagers, but the sight of the child that initially awakens his tenderness and brings him back from oblivion to the surrounding world. This seems as much to celebrate the human tenderness in the child as to show up the failure of pagan theology to ‘convert’ Marner. ‘By seeking what was needful for Eppie … he had himself come to appropriate the forms of custom and belief which were the mould of Raveloe life’ (SM, 16:213). Thus the arrival of the child forces him to ‘seek’ the villagers’ help: he has no other choice once he decides to keep Eppie. Moreover, the communal mentality is presented not as the end of his opening up but the means to another end. The word ‘appropriate’ implies some degree of alienness and expediency. Two telling phrases in the following narratorial comment spell out the externality of such village influences: there are no longer ‘angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction … But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs . . . so that they look no more backward’ (SM,

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

14:201). The hand is ‘put into theirs’; they themselves have not searched and then found it. The lack of initiative is again implied. The narrator does focus on Marner’s efforts to establish relations when describing his contact with the villagers in terms of how ‘his history became blent in a singular manner with the life of his neighbours’ (SM, 2:31). However, the expression ‘became blent’ obscures the agent of action. In some ways, Marner is forced to open up to the community by circumstances. Initially, it is circumstances that relate him to the villagers. Curing the cobbler’s wife Sally Oates has certainly offered ‘a possibility of some fellowship with his neighbours’ (SM, 2:24). He is taken to have the same magic as that of ‘the Wise Woman at Tarley’ who ‘had charms as well as “stuff”’ (SM, 2:25) and who has died and taken all her magic to the grave. Such assumptions are so entrenched that ‘no one believed [Marner] when he said he knew no charms and could work no cures’ (SM, 2:26). His answer only ‘heightened the repulsion between him and his neighbours’ (SM, 2:26). For over fifteen years, ‘he was regarded by his neighbours in Raveloe’ with ‘the mixture of contemptuous pity, dread, and suspicion’ (SM, 5:62). When the villagers’ sympathy is reawakened by his misfortune of losing his money, Marner does feel a ‘faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill’ (SM, 10:124). Nevertheless, their goodwill is not sufficient to bring his mind to peace. Why cannot Marner in the end love the villagers the way Dolly loves him? Dolly takes events in the village in terms of natural phenomena and tries to convince Marner that he should accept them in the same terms: ‘like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest’ (SM, 14:186). This is how Dolly tries to ‘convert’ him: ‘I can never rightly know the meaning o’ what I hear at church, only a bit here and there, but I know it’s good words’ (SM, 16:215). Marner seldom accepts Dolly’s ‘exposition’ of ‘the Raveloe theology’. Still overpowered by his original religion, Marner replies, ‘you’re i’ the right … there’s dealings with us—there is dealings’ (SM, 16:218). Dolly can let go of the origins of events but Marner cannot. Yet not knowing origins is only the beginning of his agony; the real agony lies in his inability to find them out. Even after he goes back into the village ‘fold’, he is still haunted by his conviction derived from his traumatic experience in Lantern Yard. He is still all left to himself; no deity is taking care of him. The religion of Raveloe is very much a pagan ‘religion’ that depends on customs, assumptions and practices. The support for Marner may come in the form of narratives of superstition. ‘Mr Macey … was of

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

62

63

opinion that when a man had done what Silas had done by an orphan child, it was a sign that his money would come to light again’ (SM, 16:211). Mr Macey is of course always right. In the Conclusion, Mr Macey has to make an appearance for this very purpose. Even when confined to a wheelchair, he has the ‘final say’: ‘I’ve lived to see my words come true. I was the first to say there was no harm in you … and I was the first to say you’d get your money back’ (SM, ‘Conclusion’:272). Marner knows that what Macey predicts is right, but that things happen not just because he has predicted them. Marner lives in an environment where the need for the cultivation of fellowship becomes so overwhelming that there is always the danger of invalidating the vital link between communal convention and moral support. Christmas becomes an occasion to reiterate custom and express goodwill. Ironically, when the narrator deliberately makes clear that the neighbours’ ‘kindlier feeling’ at Christmas is not adulterated, namely, the kindness ‘took the shape least allied to the complimentary and hypocritical’ (SM, 10:118, 119), one does detect an overtone that threatens the very convention of Christmas. Even without Christmas, the ‘kindlier feeling’ would be continuously available given some other accidental outlet or impetus. Marner thus strikes us as an autonomous outsider in Raveloe, facing all the neighbourly sympathy and persuasion. Yet this is not a question of his resisting ‘integration’ into Raveloe simply by internalizing communal memory from another time and place and thus protecting his sense of self from being fragmented by the integrating process. The communal mentality of fear in Lantern Yard ‘had bred no fancies in him that could raise the phantasm of appetite’ (SM, 1:6). His self is both shaped and fragmented by his implicit and ambivalent understanding of such an ethos. In the organic life of Raveloe, his self is paradoxically ‘reassembled’ back together against the essentially intransitive mode of sympathy so abundantly available there. The tension between a belief in the emotional support of village life and the fact that specific forms of this life may not deliver the support reveals itself further in the representation of altruism in Silas Marner. The natural status of human relations (as part of the pastoral environment here) is evoked, as in Comte, for reaching altruism in its most basic form: being good to others, being concerned for others. Nevertheless, the narratorial emphasis on his lack of orientation helps to conjure up in Marner, unintentionally, an altruism manqué. The crux here lies in the important role that consciousness plays. Lewes conceives of altruism as ‘determined by the fullest conscious-

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

ness—emotional and cognitive—of relations’ (FC, II, 27). He is not alone in highlighting this generative capacity of consciousness. The same capacity is to some degree also crucial in the Feuerbachian understanding of ‘feeling’, according to which, ‘Man has the consciousness not only of a spring of activity, but also of a spring of suffering in himself’.38 In contrast, Spencer sees altruism as an ‘unconscious or conscious’ action that ‘involves expenditure of individual life to the end of increasing life in other individuals’.39 For Eliot, the consciousness of relations does not mean mere physical connection with a community, something Marner and the villagers in relation to him have achieved. While communal custom and belief supposedly ‘reawaken’ his sensibilities and memories, he finds himself time and again disoriented. In the case of Maggie Tulliver, such disorientation or discontinuity is more ambivalent. She flies from the bondage of her community but eventually returns to die there. In this, the fact of merely belonging to a community hardly guarantees any moral support. If the idea of ties, of duty and of personal links with community is reaffirmed in Silas Marner, it indicates the inadequacy of sheer obedience and should therefore be taken as a warning against any indiscriminate acceptance or internalization of tradition. Communal feelings alone cannot become the medium through which altruism is formulated if there is a lack of consciousness of relations in an individual character. In this sense, a communal mode of life is only the condition for realizing altruism but is never altruism itself. Ironically, though cataleptic trances send Marner ‘into a mysterious rigidity and suspension of consciousness’ (SM, 1:11), neither his displaced status in Raveloe, nor his severance from life in Lantern Yard, nor his cataleptic oblivion to his surroundings, makes his isolation any worse. Unlike the subconscious moments in The Mill on the Floss, such oblivion is most sympathetically depicted. It has no selfish impetus behind it, nor does it entail any consequences that would hurt other people’s feelings. The direction of Marner’s moral progress reveals itself clearly by the end of the novel. It is symbolic that he brings Eppie to visit Lantern Yard: the name of the town is never mentioned; Lantern Yard has been destroyed; yesterday is nowhere to be found. It seems that memory has no location when the physical space that confirms it is removed; he is forced to fall back on his new community. But will he? He is able to connect his past and present by not giving up his personal perspective, which places everything new in relation to his memory of sufferings in Lantern Yard, a past primarily and meaningfully framed by his move to Raveloe. What makes the characterization

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

64

65

of Marner so appealing and charming is the extent to which his perspective may survive the Raveloe mentality and he manages to avoid being reduced to just another villager. His own sense of self relies not just on ‘a continual stream of rhythmic memories’ (MF, 4:3:256), but on his understanding of their relevance to his life. Disunified as it may be, his personal perspective has thus become the site of his memory. The need for maintaining a viable personal self, even if it is discordant with public expectation, heralds an important theme to which Eliot frequently returns in her Gesellschaft novels. Her own quotation from Comte made after she finished Daniel Deronda also captures her position at this early stage of her writing career: The historical spirit has a natural tendency to make us disdain sentiment from constantly dwelling on results without taking account of intentions. It might thus so far misunderstand its true mission as to procure a sort of systematic sanction for those most mischievous corrupters of society who think to magnify the importance of public life by disparaging that of private life. (GEN, I, 175) Yet in the portrayal of Marner, there is an underlying tension between the narratorial effort to establish a continuous self for him and his own sense of continuity generated out of authorial characterization. This tension invokes the question whether this self consists primarily in a remembering consciousness or a continuous longing for oblivion that allows the unconscious to become not a way of escaping moral dilemmas, but a realm that is instrumental in recapitulating one’s sense of being. The narrator tends to overemphasize memory at the expense of oblivion. Anticipating similar remarks in Daniel Deronda, the narrator declares: ‘This is the history of Silas Marner, until the fifteenth year after he came to Raveloe’ (SM, 2:30). Marner does have a need for continuity. He collects the guineas, crowns and half-crowns even when he knows he will have no use for them, but there is the other side. With Janet Dempster, in contrast, social relations are essential to interpreting a personal past. ‘[In] her utmost loneliness … she gazed at her own past, almost losing the sense that it was her own’ (‘JR’, 15:276). This is the opposite of Marner. Janet has a considerable degree of continuity by way of memory, but is on the verge and thus afraid, of losing it; Marner has it but wants to lose it. The narrator of ‘Janet’s Repentance’, like that of Silas Marner, is very

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

eager to assert: ‘We have all of us considerable regard for our past self’ (‘JR’, 12:265), suggesting that this self is ultimately made up of the sequence of memories that would bridge chasms of oblivion. For Marner, oblivion of the past is the only way to remain himself precisely because oblivion and, for that matter, cataleptic trances are called for by too much debilitating memory, ‘a sense of crowding remembrances from which he turned away timidly’ (SM, 14:193). In such a sequential need for oblivion and the unconscious, his self is constantly reassured.40 While oblivion is his form of ‘remembrance’, it is, instead of being mere oblivion, always mingled with his fear of an uninvited and unconquerable memory. Cathy Caruth’s observation about ‘the traumatized’ may help to explain this need: ‘they recover a past that encounters consciousness only through the very denial of active recollection’.41 The unconscious may make up, to borrow Lewes’s words, ‘the larger part of our psychical activity’ (PLM3, 139). The idea of ‘chasm’ in this novel shows again the contrast between a self based on the character’s own needs and one imposed by the narrator. The narrator tells us that Marner weaves so as ‘to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life’ (SM, 2:23) and correlates the painful past and the alien present from an external point of view: ‘he had begun to ponder over the elements of his old faith, and blend them with his new impressions, till he recovered a consciousness of unity between his past and present’ (SM, 16:213). This process of recollection is designed mainly to combat the forgetful impact of exile and to extend the possibility of what is declared at the beginning of Silas Marner: ‘Marner’s inward life had been a history and a metamorphosis’ (SM, 1:10). This narratorial position makes his perpetual longing for oblivion morally not recommendable: ‘Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile’ (SM, 2:20). The past will remain painful to him and to someone like him, say, Dickens’s Miss Havisham, who is perhaps one of the most memorable characters who cling to their personal memories. For Marner, to forget the past is to live wilfully in the present. So his cataleptic trance is both involuntary and voluntary, both physiological and mental. For Miss Havisham, the past has to be close by to reassure her of her own identity, to the extent that the past has to be perpetuated in Estella. Without oblivion, life for Marner will just be all memories. It would be reductive to take his traumatic psyche after the ‘fall’ as a mere continuation or expansion of his personality. He is, before the incident, ‘believed to be a young man of exemplary life and ardent faith’ (SM, 1:10–11). ‘He loved the

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

66

67

purpose then’ (SM, 2:24; original emphasis), but after the incident all purpose is gone for him. Like Maggie’s past in the St Ogg’s community, his past claims too many ties, too much obligation, but no support. Only the ‘chasm’ can sever him from effects of the past. In a sense, he weaves so as to forget about the past, not for connection or reaching out, but for the necessity of oblivion and for the hope of a new self. The narrator’s ambiguous use of the notion of ‘the past’ inadvertently highlights the same need: the painful component of the past is often suppressed so that a happier moment from the past can be enhanced. Treating Sally Oates has, according to the narrator, restored his ‘sense of unity’ (SM, 2:25): the ‘once familiar herbs … belonged to the past, from which his life had shrunk away’ (SM, 2:31). However, the ‘past’ here, selected by the narrator, is a past where Marner could watch his mother relieving other people’s pains, which is different from the traumatic past that constantly bothers him. By selecting this happier past, the agony of the other past is bypassed. The story would have missed its point if the past that matters to him does not include the unhappy memory that defines much of his sense of self. Nevertheless, the contrast between these two perspectives – the narrator’s and the character’s – conjures up a central position in Eliot’s early writings, very similar to that of Wordsworth. Paul Hamilton, for example, has pointed out that the individuality of Wordsworth’s characters who are ‘inmates of the household of man’ ‘consists in living outside the community’. For Wordsworth, ‘those who are in some way socially disabled or disinherited are especially qualified to be the bearers of an uncensored imagination’; yet, in spite ot this, ‘the inheritance of social restraints and inhibitions cannot be given up’.42 It is in this sense that a personal perspective in the unhistoric act of an individual character becomes significant. Marner’s need for oblivion and for a retreat to the unconscious highlights Eliot’s view, more clearly defined in Middlemarch, that individual acts can be complicated and not easily accessible. Just as for Carlyle, ‘History is the essence of innumerable Biographies’ and aspects of these ‘Biographies’ will remain ‘unintelligible to us’ (‘On History’, WTC, XXVII, 86), so for Eliot, personal lives are the inaudible and silent side of social life. As the narrator of ‘Janet’s Repentance’ reminds us, ‘spiritual truths … are only to be won by long wrestling with [one’s] own sins and [one’s] own sorrows’ (‘JR’, 10:256–7). This may also explain why in 1857 Eliot told Charles Bray, ‘My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathise with individual suffering and individual joy’ (Cross, I, 472).

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Like Eliot’s other works, The Lifted Veil, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner deal with the relations between personal memory and communal memory. Nevertheless, each work has its own distinctive concern, sets up a new situation, which is defined by the dilemmas and difficulties specific only to the particular characters. Taken together, they conjure up the depth and range of selves defined both with and against communal memory at the conscious, subconscious and unconscious levels. None of the three characters discussed in this chapter starts with an exclusive and closed personal consciousness. Latimer remembers well his mother’s love, though short-lived; Maggie, unlike Hetty and Dinah, both orphans, starts with a reasonably secure childhood among families and relations; and Marner initially belongs to a religious fellowship and is ‘highly thought of’ in his church assembly. Relations with people close to them have led them to retreat to their recollection of an enclosed past. Latimer’s consciousness is, with or without his acquiescence, ‘invaded’ by previsions of Bertha who is stark, forceful, cunning and violent; Maggie’s consciousness initially by family members’ disapproval of her behaviour and later by the overwhelming values of St Ogg’s, though internalized as her own moral sanctions; Marner’s consciousness by the wrongful accusation that reduces him to ‘the remnants of a disinherited race’ (SM, 1:3). Their enchanting and disenchanting tales spell out for us not only how they try to be communal to survive, but the traumatic processes of making such attempts. In the end, hardly has Latimer’s heart gone out towards ‘the men and women and children whose faces were becoming familiar to [him]’ (LV, 2:340) when his personal history drives him away ‘to live continually with the one Unknown Presence’ (LV, 2:340). Marner fares best since the village does try to take him in. Yet it is also in Marner that we get the strongest signal of scepticism, a note of caution that questions the apparent harmony of village support and yet confirms the possibility and validity of a personal perspective even when it is so burdened with the collective. All three works explore the question of how essentially a self depends on personal memory taken as the lived totality of one’s incorporation of communal memory into personal identity. Yet it is only in relation to the complex representation of communal memory that personal memory assumes a voice and space and it is only in this sense that together both such memories help to sustain the moral agency of the characters.

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

68

The Moment in History: The Temporal Sense of Emotional Development in Romola

Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history … the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action. (George Eliot, DD, 16:149) While researching for the background of Romola, Eliot noted in her diary on Sunday 7 July 1986: ‘Read the Introduction to Savonarola’s poems … Busied myself with a plan of rational mnemonics in history’.1 The phrase ‘rational mnemonics in history’ hits upon a crucial aspect of Romola as a historical novel: the emotional development of the characters is enacted by a narrative of remembering, which is approached from a historical point of view. Like the Gemeinschaft novels, Romola shows a primary concern with the ways in which assumptions behind customs, legends and mythological systems are gradually transformed into moral principles and with how they may condition the psychology of characters. Nevertheless, as a novel explicitly concerned with history and its uses, it finally confronts an issue that has gathered momentum up to Romola: whether the past is part of a cyclic and recurrent history, or a stage out of which the present may grow. Put differently, this is also an issue about whether the past is valuable in itself or only in the meaning it may hold for the present. In Eliot’s earlier works, we can often detect narratorial efforts to correlate these aspects of continuity and discontinuity and the attendant difficulties of doing so: the narrator often contrasts the past with the present while trying to accommodate a strongly held belief that 69

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

3

Romola and the Moment in History

intense moments of moral struggle in the past are hardly meaningful until one sees them as enlightening for the present. The Mill on the Floss is particularly indicative of such a tension. The history of St Ogg’s seems encapsulated in the metaphor of ‘millennial tree’ (MF, 1:12:101), which suggests a primarily linear model with its apocalyptic revelation of the future. The syntactical movement of the lengthy description of the town at the beginning of the novel, with its repeated uses of the present perfect tense, tends to subsume the past in the present. However, the imaginative journey down the Rhône and the Rhine on a summer’s day suggests an equally valid model of contrast. In addition, while much attention is given to the thriving and palpable nature of life within St Ogg’s, one can always detect the presence of a more constant and static communal existence looming in the background: ‘The mind of St Ogg’s did not look extensively before or after. It inherited a long past without thinking of it’ (MF, 1:12:103). It is against this background that the ‘Saxon hero-king’, the ‘heathen Dane’, and the civil wars busily enter and exit the stage of history (MF, 1:12:101). The sense of contrast in the opening remarks of ‘Journeying down the Rhône’ and the ‘Rhine’ recalls the nostalgic beginning of ‘Amos Barton’ and anticipates a whole series of similar remarks such as those in the Introduction to Felix Holt. Occasionally, this appreciation of the rural past, which makes Eliot turn to the Gemeinschaft setting in the first place, may dissipate the focus of themes such as ‘growth’ and ‘outcome’ and of how the past still lives in the present. An atmosphere of pastoral life where time seems frozen may equally marginalize the developmental senses of the concept of ‘environment’. At the beginning of Adam Bede, the perspective of contrast soon slides into a description of the timeless. As the emotions of the characters are ‘frozen’ and eternalized in a pastoral past, the narratorial focus is shifted from the implications of imagining a past to the imagined past itself, since the implications depend on historical changes for their raison d’être. This is not to deny, though, that this mesmerizing ‘spell’ of the pastoral is often ‘broken’ by the narratorial awareness of the connection between the past and the present, an awareness that dissociates the narrator from the apparent timelessness of pastoral life and reveals a preoccupation with moral dilemmas in the face of progress and change. So just as a historicist perspective has highlighted a sense of distance if not severance, a focus on the effect of communal feelings may retrieve a collective history primarily for its topical value. Here I use ‘historicist’ strictly in the sense defined by the Oxford

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

70

71

English Dictionary as the tendency ‘to see . . . historical thinking as the most important type of thought, because of its interest in the concrete, unique, and individual’ (sense 2). The same tension is further intensified in Romola. Eliot’s novels are said to contain ‘two unreconciled temporal perspectives’: ‘that emanating from passionate present experience and that arising from a judicious overview’.2 Given her initial conception of the ‘mnemonic’ enterprise, to discuss Romola in these terms may not be enough. Renaissance Florence marks an intense moment of self-reflection, a moment that consciously links the past with the present and the future. It may thus be more fruitful to understand such ‘mnemonics in history’ in terms of the temporal senses implied in the two major models of history identified by some of Eliot’s contemporaries: history as recurrent, cyclic and, to a certain extent, discontinuous and history as essentially evolutionary and teleological. The critical point here is to see how relevant these temporal senses are to moments of emotional conflicts in Romola and how the ‘mnemonic’ representation in Romola may in turn test the efficacy of these models of history. A moment in Chapter 20 (‘The Day of the Betrothal’) illustrates this relevance. On that day, the wedding party of Tito and Romola forms a ‘dignified little procession … [passing] along the Ponte Rubaconte towards Santa Croce’ (R, 20:203) when it finds itself facing ‘an invention of Piero di Cosimo’ – the masque of ‘a huge and ghastly image of Winged Time with his scythe and hour-glass, surrounded by his winged children, the Hours’, forming a dark crowd (R, 20:204). Here, the intersection of the two processions indicates that, while each is meaningful in itself, their juxtaposition forms a charged moment of significance. The wedding procession observes the ceremonial ritual of old times; its externalized performance repeats and incorporates a past that is acted out as the present. The masque of the ‘Winged Time’ and his children, though also an externalized performance, is invented for the present moment by Piero di Cosimo by modelling on conventions – the masque was a fantasy that Eliot rescued from Italian history.3 The masque initiates an important stage in Romola’s emotional struggle, yet its meaning is predicated on the wedding procession. These ‘apparitions floating through the air’ (R, 20:204) confirm half of her brother Dino’s vision of her unhappy future, which includes both a similar ‘troop of the sheeted dead gliding above blackness’ (R, 20:204) and the nuptial ritual. They intimate to her that what she thinks to have left behind – ‘that past on which she was going to turn her back for ever’ (R, 36:324) – is catching up on her. The ‘Winged Time’

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

perturbs her, not because it can fly, but because it suggests possibilities of directions which may not always be within her expectation or control. Expanding further on the senses of time, Tito’s recipe for alleviating the ‘cold horror’ for Romola is to ‘look only at the images of our happiness now’, confirmed and secured by repeated rituals (R, 20:204). For Romola, concentration on their ‘happiness now’, or, rather, her wilful obliteration of the masque, only intensifies the implication that this moment may have for her future. Such an intersection of the processions turns memories from the past into anxieties of the present and omens for the future. Juxtaposing these two processions has enabled Eliot to address the dialectics of temporality and continuity, of constancy and change and of recurrent and linear senses of history.

‘With ancient yet with modern eyes’: two models of history What exactly, then, does the temporal sense of emotional development mean? It includes the intersecting points of psychological and historical times, psychological since time can only be registered in human affective understanding and historical because time past is necessarily implied in the psychological moment. The processions serve to point up a pattern in Romola: the sense of time in the characters’ moral reflections is registered in the metaphors and allusions that evoke a daunting array of forms and concatenations from different stages of Western history.4 The first piece of information that Tito reveals about himself is his declaration to Bratti, ‘I am no Hebrew’ (R, 1:13). The placing of Tito in Renaissance Florence as ‘a Greek stock planted in Italian soil’ (R, 3:29), as he himself later tells Nello the barber, epitomizes the recurring patterns of pagan mentality and suggests that moral development means a constant negotiation with the feelings that one has inherited. Historical time may thus help to interpret psychological time and vice versa. Time becomes what Ricoeur calls ‘human time’, or rather moral time, in the sense that this time consists in the ‘remembering’ of the past at a given moral moment. It is also in this sense that emotional development may pose itself as a psychological counterpart to chronological time. While moral evolution is registered in the mode of remembering, memory becomes both a measure of history and an epic in itself.5 Eliot’s understanding of the characters’ emotional development is thus both representational and epistemological.

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

72

73

This understanding expands the Comtean notion of moral progress, which does not include psychology. For Eliot, it is ultimately emotional moments that turn chronology into history. She once quoted in her notebook a lengthy passage from Ernst Curtius’s Griechische Geschichte, which explicates why events and happenings, if devoid of human psychology, constitute only chronology and not history. Thus the ancient Egyptians ‘haben Chronologie, aber keine Geschichte im vollen Sinne des Worts’ (‘possess a chronology, but no history in the full sense of the word’; GEN, II, 72).6 Lewes says as much: ‘history … in its highest form is not the chronicle of events’, but ‘the Life of Humanity as evolved by human beings’.7 The concern of Eliot and Lewes with this internal time seems to reflect a crisis typical of their period. Like their contemporaries such as Ruskin and Arnold, they were deeply disturbed by unsettling social changes when their own position in historical time was in question, no longer organically placed nor rationally accountable.8 This emphasis on human involvement and participation already appeared in 1856 in Eliot’s often quoted review essay ‘The Natural History of German Life’. In this, she also shared the Romantic feeling in mid-Victorian England for the obscure and the provincial, reflecting one of the two models of historical time already mentioned. Historians who entertained such Romantic feelings, as Edward Augustus Freeman said of Green, would look on a town ‘as a whole with a kind of personal history’.9 Carlyle was acutely aware of the changing forms of ‘the LIFE OF MAN in England: what men did, thought, suffered, enjoyed; the form, especially the spirit, of their terrestrial existence, its outward environment, its inward principle’ (‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, WTC, XXVIII, 81). Historians of this persuasion sought to establish a historiographical principle in marked contrast to the rationalist approach to chronicle history dominant in the eighteenth century. They believed that such human aspects of common life can be imaginatively reconstructed and represented. Their approach illustrates what John Burrow describes, with respect to Carlyle, as ‘the romantic intensification of antiquarianism into a kind of imaginative archaeology’.10 This imaginative appeal is readily found in Carlyle’s depiction of medieval England, especially in his nostalgia for the sedimentary charm of ancient Bury St Edmunds. Eliot also made, according to John Blackwood, a ‘distinction between what is called the real and the imaginative’. She believed that ‘[any] real observation of life and character must be limited and the imagination must fill in and give life to the picture’ (L, III, 427). For her, ‘all these grand elements of history

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

require the illumination of special imaginative treatment’ (E, 446), which calls for a historiographical principle that places an unprecedented emphasis on the moment of events. She especially praised Carlyle’s ‘masterly power of close delineation’ in a review of his The Life of John Sterling (E, 51). The purpose of Carlyle’s insistence on the need for ‘individualizing sensory detail’ and on a concrete and imaginative presentation is to revive the ‘distinctive inward spirit’ of the past.11 In one of his letters to Emerson, he observes that ‘[there] is no use of writing of things past, unless they can be made in fact things present: not yesterday at all, but simply to-day and what it holds of fulfilment and of promises is ours’.12 Here the phrase ‘things present’ seems deliberately ambiguous: ‘things past’ can be made through imagination vividly present to the consciousness of modern readers, so that ‘things past’ can be made ‘things present’.13 Carlyle’s endeavour to revivify the past moment thus leads him to appreciate qualities inherent in the past present. This fascination may be better understood with the help of his idea of the present: The Past is a dim indubitable fact: the Future too is one, only dimmer; nay properly it is the same fact in new dress and development. For the Present holds it in both the whole Past and the whole Future;—as the LIFE-TREE IGDRASIL, wide-waving, many-toned, has its roots down deep in the Death-kingdoms, among the oldest dead dust of men, and with its boughs reaches always beyond the stars; and in all times and places is one and the same Life-tree! (Past and Present, WTC, X, 38; original emphasis) Carlyle’s metaphor, unlike Herder’s evocation of history as growing like seeds and plants ‘blossoming’,14 has its emphasis on constancy, rather than metamorphosis and on all history as a single tree, or the self-revelation of an immanent ‘LIFE-TREE’. The metaphor here of ‘holding’ is a complex one, embracing connotations of ‘supporting’, ‘containing’, ‘possessing’ and ‘owning’. An important meaning of ‘holding’ can be elucidated by his idea of ‘contiguity’. In 1840, he used the word ‘contiguity’ in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History where he indicated how ‘it related, with a wondrous new contiguity and perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with the Present in time and place’. ‘Contiguity’ here means ‘of non-physical contact’ and ‘proximity of impressions or ideas in place or time’ (‘contiguity’, OED); the sense of distance is invariably implied. What he highlighted is that in spite of the distance between the past and the

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

74

75

present, we still feel their closeness through our imagination. As John Rosenberg perceptively puts it, ‘for Carlyle the contrary of history is not fiction but oblivion, the unravelling of the collective human memory that holds, [sic] civilization together’.15 The Comtean concept of history equally relates the tangible details of the specific moment to history, though for an ultimately different epistemology from Carlyle’s: the meaning of these moments lies primarily in the part that they may play for understanding future development. In the very early stage of his career, Carlyle borrowed the idea of historical periodicity from the Saint-Simonians (Comte being an important member of the group) who saw history as cyclic but ultimately progressive.16 Carlyle’s philosophy was in particular given shape by the Comtean concept of continuity17 – ‘the Centuries’, writes Carlyle in Past and Present, ‘are all lineal children of one another’ (WTC, X, 39). However, his philosophy does not necessarily imply a single, linear continuation, or a smooth or coherent one. Once professing to be in ‘entire sympathy’ with the Saint-Simonians, he eventually fell out with them18 and came to see history as an apocalyptic and sometimes abrupt mode of continuity.19 Continuity can be taken as implied in the ‘holding’ mode between two disastrous periods, which may imply gaps and inconsequence. Historical periods alternate between ‘belief’, ‘unbelief’, ‘nature’, ‘culture’ and ‘transition’ or ‘anarchy’. It is only in this sense that one dark age may be meaningful to a later greater age. In contrast to thus seeing a past moment as a manifestation of the recurrent decay and renewal in history, the Comtean model takes such a moment as the manifestation of a history that is essentially developmental and teleological. Comte’s own definition of ‘Humanity’, which Eliot noted down in her reading of his System of Positive Polity as ‘[the] continuous whole formed by the Beings which converge’ (GEN, I, 173), is intrinsically temporal. ‘It is the slow and gradual but continuous accumulation of these successive changes that constitutes the social movement of which each generation marks a step’ (EC, 164). Spencer also implies the sense of history when he realises that the adjustment of internal human relations to the external world ‘involves both Time and Space’ (PP, I, 321). Comte sees in history periods of vigour and decadence as well. Yet if one historical moment is left behind by, and thus discontinuous with, the next, it is, for most of the time, a useful oblivion that makes development possible. J. S. Mill thus describes the Saint-Simonian conception as a ‘connected view’.20 Comte and some of the other nineteenthcentury ‘scientists’ such as Spencer believed that items of data

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

belonging to a particular moment should ‘undergo a certain preparation … in order to pass from the concrete to the abstract state, by being stripped of the purely individual and adventitious circumstances of climate, locality, etc., without its essential and general part being altered’ (EC, 204).21 This is necessary because retrogression can result from ‘a too minute observation’ of history (SPP, III, 60). Again, this is not to say that Carlyle’s conception does not allow for local developments. In 1829, he regarded his age in ‘Signs of the Times’ as progressive since ‘[knowledge and] education are opening the eyes of the humblest; are increasing the number of thinking minds without limit’ (WTC, XXVII, 80). Yet to him, development becomes such only to the extent that it constitutes parts of an overall cyclic pattern: ‘Old England too has had her share of such frenzies and panics’ and ‘the distemper is of pretty regular recurrence’ (‘Signs of the Times’, WTC, XXVII, 57). As John Burrow points out, ‘Essentially in Carlyle there is not sequence but only the cyclic assurance of the retribution that waits for forms from which the spirit has departed, and the endless self-renewal of the latter’. It is mainly ‘a recurring pattern, not a consummation’.22 On the other hand, though, it is inaccurate to take linear and teleological development as the only temporal sense in Comte. Although ‘institutions and doctrines’ to him ‘always manifested a progressive and never a retrograde character’ (SPP, IV, 575), this model of social development is not identical with his epistemological model: ‘In place of saying: the past, the present and the future, we should say the past, the future, and the present. In truth it is only when we have conceived the future by the aid of the past that we can with advantage revert to the present so as to seize its true character’ (SPP, IV, 563).23 The temporal senses in both Carlyle and Comte may be seen to characterize the moral struggles of the characters in Romola. The Comtean understanding, already present in Eliot’s early novels, becomes in Romola more systematic, systematic in the same sense as defined by Comte: ‘A real knowledge then of the Laws of Mind can only be furnished by the Positive study of the whole course of human development’ (SPP, III, 39–40). It is also more focused. One of the major themes is to seek ‘that hidden knowledge which would break through the barrier of man’s brief life, and show its dark path … to be an arc in an immeasurable circle of light and glory’ (R, ‘Proem’:3). The scope of the evolution of human feelings is much wider, not just in the context of cultivating altruism, but in the epic evolution of human feelings. Whether Eliot was self-consciously mapping out this ‘whole course’ is not the point here. What is important is that she

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

76

77

engaged with the notion. She read Comte’s Philosophie Positive while writing Romola and told Sara Sophia Hennell in July 1861 that she had been reading ‘the Survey of the Middle Ages contained in the fifth volume’ and ‘to my apprehension few chapters can be fuller of luminous ideas’: ‘I am thankful to learn from it’ (Cross, II, 310). Further, her disagreement with Comte over the remedial function of ‘the living’ can best be seen in her understanding of this ‘whole course’. Comte in his Positive Polity regarded Humanity ‘as composed essentially of the dead; these alone being fully amenable to our judgment… If the living are admitted it is, except in rare instances, only provisionally’. Eliot, however, asked, ‘If our duties are towards “Humanity” how are the living & those who are to come to be excluded?’ (GEN, I, 164). Her letter in 1880 to Frederic Harrison who had repeatedly advised her on Positivism for her novel-writing may help us to see this difference better. Eliot located for him a quotation from Wordsworth’s The Prelude for an apt understanding of humanity: ‘There is One great society alone on earth: The noble Living and the noble Dead.’ (Cross,

III,

389)

The life-long influence of Wordsworth on her which, according to Cross, has been strong ‘to the day of her death’ (Cross, I, 61) must have sustained her Romantic conception even when such a position is challenged by the Comtean notion. This interest in reconstructing the past so as to evaluate the present is shared by many of her contemporaries. In Romola, the allegorical old Florentine finds the city essentially the same for all its recent changes. His observation reminds us of the narrator’s dictum in ‘Janet’s Repentance’: ‘History, we know, is apt to repeat herself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume’ (‘JR’, 10:252). Eliot shares Carlyle’s nostalgia for and allegiance to the past, though not necessarily his preference for medieval order and hierarchy. From the standpoint of Carlyle’s anti-rationalism, the unconscious governing of communal tradition can sufficiently suggest why the past generates the present. Eliot further holds the view that, instead of setting the standards for the present, the past is there ‘to revive us’ (AB, 54:363). She values what she calls, in her review of R. W. Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect, ‘a nature which combines … a high appreciation of the genius of antiquity, with a profound belief in the progressive character

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

of human development’. Such a nature has ‘valuable qualities … “antithetically mixt”’ (E, 29) and can be defined as, to borrow Carlyle’s words, seeing history ‘with ancient yet with modern eyes’ (Past and Present, WTC, X, 107).24 Her historicist sense tends to override the influence of the sociologists, for she maintains that we must ‘allow, especially in the earlier periods, for something incalculable by us from the data of our present experience’: ‘Even within comparatively near times & in kindred communities how many conceptions & fashions of life have existed to which our understanding & sympathy has no clue!’25 The Romantic sense of mystery and incomprehension is almost always intermingled in Eliot with the search for scientific laws. It is possible that she did not entirely accept Comte’s scientific doctrine because it could not satisfy her belief in the profound complexity of human emotion and sentiment. Carlyle’s imagination may thus come as a counter-force to redress the balance. Such a position is best described by John Burrow, with regard to several historians in Victorian England, as a belief in ‘the close relationship between the comforts of continuity and the consolations of nostalgia’.26 In a letter to the critic R. H. Hutton, Eliot confided that she was conscious of the ‘imperfect degree in which I have been able to give form to my ideas’ in writing Romola (Cross, II, 360). The phrase ‘imperfect degree’ suggests the existence of a counter-force that hinders the full implementation of a formal design. In the present context, if the historiographical emphasis exemplified by Carlyle and Green is historicist, then this historicist approach, when compounded with the evolutionary perspective, would have made writing Romola doubly difficult. In short, historicism as such requires a perspective less present-oriented and less teleologically developmental than that of the nineteenth-century evolutionists. The evolutionary approach of the ‘scientists’ can be reductive because of its primary emphasis on laws and linearity, despite Comte’s call for more contextualization and diverse patterns of time and his admission that ‘temporary disorder must disorientate evolution in [the moral] sphere more than in any other’ (EC, 169). The revivifying imagination represented by Carlyle’s writings pays more attention to the past moment and consequently can allow for discontinuity. In Comte, continuity becomes imperative. He is, according to Karl Löwith, ‘blind to the perpetual possibility and actuality of historical losses, reversions, and catastrophes’.27 In Carlyle, there is a greater sense of historical cycle – renewal and revival – whereas the Comtean understanding has a greater sense of connection and relation. Carlyle recognizes the divergence and

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

78

79

convergence of events and people and can take both as single entities, valid in their own right. Details or incidents possess as much value as a major event does and equally represent the spirit of their time. For Comte and for Spencer as well, changes are the real substance of science. If details, events or particular human actions do not fit the general pattern, they must be ‘dismissed as incidental’ or partial for the sake of deriving historical laws.28 The point of focusing on the specific moments of moral conflicts in Romola is thus to see how the representation of emotional time may be better understood in the light of both the Carlylean and Comtean models.

Imagining synergy The temporal sense in Romola’s emotional development is premised on the constant and continuous nature of ‘tender fellow-feeling for the nearest’ (R, 61:508). Tender feelings are part of ‘the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history’ (R, ‘Proem’:3) and part of ‘a likeness in human building that will be broader and deeper than all possible change’ (R, ‘Proem’:4). Eliot believes that they can be ‘transformed … into an enthusiasm of sympathy with the general life’ (R, 44:389). Just as for Green, in G. P. Gooch’s summary, ‘Dynasties come and go, battles are won and lost, but the people remain’,29 so in Romola events take place, society changes, but the recurrent pattern of human longings and susceptibilities remains constant. Tender feelings appear at struggling moments for Romola. Social environment is thus more temporal than human feelings, yet it is under the workings of that environment that these feelings are sustained and developed. Momentary manifestations of essential human feelings are often evoked by social events. Romola is set in a time when ‘Lorenzo was dead, Pope Innocent was dying and a troublesome Neapolitan succession, with an intriguing, ambitious Milan, might set Italy by the ears before long: the times were likely to be difficult’ (R, 8:84). The dynamics of such an evocation is explored with much finesse. At the crucial point when Romola is compelled to denounce Camilla Rucellai’s fanatic vision, which requires Romola to betray in the name of God her godfather who is condemned for being a Medicean, Romola is torn between two forces: ‘On the side from which moral energy came lay a fanaticism from which she was shrinking with newly startled repulsion; on the side to which she was drawn by affection and memory, there was the presentiment of some secret plotting, which her judg-

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

ment told her would not be unfairly called crime’ (R, 52:450). The two obligations make a metaphorical crucifix that she has to bear; she is at the crossroads where moral justification is not supported by emotional commitment. She shrinks from both options, but the trying nature of this dilemma characterizes a fundamental question raised in Romola about ‘where the duty of obedience ends and the duty of resistance begins’ (R, 55:462). Here, the two duties are not absolute because they are established on what appear to be equally valid grounds. Similarly, Romola has to decide, upon the Excommunication of Savonarola, Prior of the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence, whether she accepts the Church as ‘a living organism instinct with divine power to bless and to curse’ or whether she should remain sympathetic to Savonarola simply out of her instinctive tenderness and kind feelings. The narrator is clearly aware of the entangled forces in her. She was not raised on ‘the traditional associations of the Christian community’ (R, 55:462); her relation to the Church is mainly mediated through Savonarola. Yet the power of the Christian associations lies, in many ways, in their appeal to basic human feelings, whereas Savonarola influences her largely through his interpretation, if not appropriation, of the Church for the moment in which he himself is situated and for the social conditions he has to live against. Here, we may recall what Comte understands as ‘intermediary conceptions’: in the ‘gradual transition’ of history, these conceptions ‘of a bastard nature’ are necessary (EC, 23). At each crucial turn of moral evolution, tender feeling is the connecting element that sustains continuity and makes every movement towards the next step organically possible. Although to the narrator, ‘tender fellow-feeling for the nearest has its danger too’ (R, 61:508), what makes each stage of emotional development possible is the basic feeling of sympathy. For the same reason, while her pagan education compels her to denounce Dino’s Christian dogmatism, Romola’s innate susceptibility to love and kindness has helped her to remain open-minded about his emotions. On his death bed, she softens towards the ideas that he tries to pass on. Such susceptibility also explains why at the execution of her godfather ‘she looked with the eyes of personal tenderness and he with the eyes of theoretic conviction’ (R, 61:508; original emphases). Her sympathy helps to bridge the gaps between different versions of love – pagan tenderness, Christian benevolence and Renaissance humanism. In this sense, sympathy belongs both to the moment and to history as it represents a present by means of fusing the past and

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

80

81

the future. Sympathetic feelings are valuable for their capacity as a medium: ‘the widening influence of ideas … would hardly be such strong agents unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling’ (R, 52:449–50). For Romola, tender feeling is thus constantly retrievable and is likely to be felt at any given moment; changes in emotional development are, for the same reason, not drastic changes, but are happening all the time. Seen from the opposite direction, though, such a conception undermines the idea of development and saves Romola from being a mere textbook Positivist priestess. In Comte, cultivating sympathy and, for that matter, altruism primarily means overcoming one’s egoistic instincts. In Romola this issue amounts to retrieving dormant human feelings for their potentialities. Before meeting Savonarola, ‘the larger possibilities of her nature … lay folded and crushed like embryonic wings’ (R, 27:250). Dorothea Barrett has clarified an important aspect of Eliot’s engagement with Comtean Positivism. Eliot’s is ‘a synthesis of polytheism and monotheism rather than as the end of a linear progress’ and ‘the synthesis … is not the actualization of Comte’s religion of humanity … but rather the hazily-envisioned better world towards which, throughout [her] canon, George Eliot gestures’.30 When Romola is about to move away from the narrow Christian doctrines of Savonarola and to leave Tito as well, it is hardly the Religion of Humanity alone that causes the move. She rebuts Tito in the following terms: ‘the law that should make us one can never be obeyed. I too am a human being. I have a soul of my own that abhors your actions’ (R, 58:489). She returns to a moral sense that her initial pagan education, which, in Tito’s words, has ‘a touch of fanaticism’ (R, 27:256), would be sufficient to shape. Even when her ‘tenderness and keen fellow-feeling for the near and the loved’ are described as ‘the main outgrowth of the affections’ (R, 36:325), her pagan tenderness for father, husband and brother is retained in her, both as a Christian Madonna who accepts womanly labours so as to care for her fellow citizens and as a Positivist humanist who sees things in terms of love for humanity. The emphasis on the constant, though often dormant, tender feelings has given prominence to their pagan origins, which, though instrumental in moral evolution, imply little evolution in themselves. So the question remains: to what extent is her moral journey really a journey of development? Eliot believes that ‘[our] lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race’ (R, 39:353). The representation of these two moral tradi-

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

tions is more problematic than the analogy suggests. The marriage between Romola and Tito is a marriage of cultures, of historical moments and, in particular, of qualities allegorized by themselves: virtue, trust, heroism, egotism and evil. Marriage as such weakens the need for developing moral feelings in either of the two characters, though such a development is inevitable and imperative according to the narrator. The most intricate case is the character portrayal of Tito. The formation of Tito’s immoral thoughts is clearly traced in ways quite different from the Gemeinschaft novels where egoistic inclinations are identified not so much by their history as by their present manifestations. Such a disposition gives him a better chance than Romola for emotional cultivation, but not development, since, for Eliot as well as Comte, development should move in the direction of altruism instead of egoism. The process is rarely punctuated by retribution, which does not happen until the end of the novel. To sustain such a suspense, Tito’s moral dilemma in the first half of the novel is compounded with his sympathy, which turns him into a far more credible and accessible character than Romola. He ‘sold all his jewels, except the ring he did not choose to part with’ (R, 9:96). Even after he resolves to ‘disown’ his father, witnessing how Baldassarre fails to prove his identity at the garden supper can still incite in him tender reactions. Justice, though ruthlessly done, is not seen to be done until close to the end of the novel when Tito is killed by Baldassarre. Tito’s Dionysian nature makes him a man of the moment, a moment that is nevertheless recurrent and almost timeless. His inner struggles are explained accordingly. ‘Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition: he had won no memories of self-conquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could have a sense of falling’ (R, 39:353). He wants to live in the moment without being too much caught up in its constraints. He ‘had gone on following the impulses of the moment’ (R, 9:98). He always wants to disown the past so as ‘to be free from any hidden shackles that would gall him, though ever so little, under his ties to Romola’ (R, 18:186). To Bernardo ‘he is one of the demoni, who are of no particular country’ (R, 19:195). His ‘adventure’ also unhinges him from chronological time and space. The real point of being a devil is that not only is he of no particular country, he is of no particular time either. Yet ultimately, he is not entirely devoid of his own historicity. Being a devil registers him in moral time framed by the plot and the presence of other characters. He does not fear so much the claim of old sentiments as recognition – in the momentary yet momentous drama of anagnorisis. He is more afraid of

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

82

83

immediate and external threat: suspense would mean impending danger. The separate roles played by Romola and Tessa can be taken as testing out different aspects of Tito’s moral character, in theoretical and homely terms. It may be more pertinent to see the characters as being there to anchor his moral weightlessness. In the same way, when Tito and Baldassarre are both found dead together – ‘It was not possible to separate them’ (R, 67:555) – the moment is symbolic due to what each represents: rootless floating wheeling–dealing ‘anchored’ by a strong moral and emotional claim based on love, virtue and duty. The lack of immediate punitive response may be attributed to the historicist assumption in Romola that ‘in strictness there is no replacing of relations: the presence of the new does not nullify the failure and breach of the old’ (R, 69:568). Nevertheless, it reveals a more fundamental conceptual inadequacy: why are altruistic emotions in Romola presented as necessarily overcoming egoistic instincts when basic human nature comprises the contending claims of egoism and altruism? For Eliot, they are both of moral significance in the evolution of feelings. Yet, Tito’s egoistic emotions function largely as a sounding-board against which Romola’s altruistic emotions may be seen to come into being and validate themselves. The intensity of his egoism is diffused once conflicts of the moment are resolved. By contrast, Romola’s altruistic emotions are always given priority for their presence and particularly for their latent effects – her story is often determined or dictated by remembered history. The difference in how memory affects them is mostly a difference between two types of morality, which according to Michael Oakeshott are ‘a habit of affection and behaviour’ and a ‘reflective application of a moral criterion’.31 The narrator seems frustrated by the need to justify the necessary triumph of altruistic feelings in moments of emotional conflicts. With a light touch of irony, we are reminded that ‘to have once acted nobly seems a reason why we should always be noble’ (R, 39:353). This unaccounted-for triumph of altruistic feelings over egoistic emotions is a problem embedded in Comte’s own theory of altruism, for he often only asserts but hardly argues for such a triumph. Lewes seems to perceive a physiological basis for moral teleology, but his argument is not fully developed either (SP, 144–5). Spencer develops his theory about the cultivation of altruistic feelings by ‘corresponding the evolutionary end of greatest happiness to its moral end’. He does distinguish between ‘a moral psychology and a moral science’. But in his understanding, the two lead to the same outcome. He

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

explains the production of certain ‘innate tendencies toward altruistic behaviour’32 by arguing that ‘thus commenced, and survival of the fittest tending ever to maintain and increase it, it will be further strengthened by the inherited effects of habit’ (PP, II, 561). This is an example of his ‘immutability of belief’33 that can also sometimes be found in Eliot’s conception. Earlier in Adam Bede, the damning criticism of the ‘loving nature’ of Arthur, for whom ‘[deeds] of kindness were as easy to him as a bad habit’ (AB, 29:33), suggests that human nature can be initially egoistic. Eliot’s own statement is more explicit: ‘All emotions in the beginning are egoistic’.34 None of these ideas indicate that memories ought to result in a willing control of one’s egoistic instincts so as to help to form a natural inclination towards altruism. Romola lacks a valid explanation as well, despite its awareness of the need to justify this theory. Altruism becomes the ultimate moral criterion and thus the moral end, even when the narrator’s sympathy and unintended justification for Tito have undercut the privileged evolutionary triumph of altruistic feelings. The juxtaposition of an intense moment as in itself significant and its location in history resembles the Carlylean zooming in The French Revolution, where Carlyle uses ‘contrasts of scale, of close-up and distant landscape’.35 In Chapter 61 (‘Drifting Away’), the attempt to combine the cyclic and the evolutionary is best seen in a metaphor that in effect warns against any simplistic understanding of linearity, for linearity may imply cyclic pattern as well: ‘Fruit is Seed’ (R, 31:279). Results therefore are a new beginning. Based on this pattern, the cyclic or recurrent model of history becomes a dialectical concept since it seeks permanence in change and explains change through permanence. Valerie A. Dodd has rightly observed that Carlyle ‘merged concepts’ and ‘reconciled notions of continuity and change’.36 But to understand Eliot’s position we need to go a step further. The ‘merged concepts’ in Romola consist not in how to maintain essence in a time of change but in how to understand drastic historical change with a view to the continuity of basic human nature. This temporal dialectic of recapitulation also shows the immanent connections between continuity and discontinuity. Worried about the threat posed by the strange military move of the French, Goro, whom we first meet in Nello’s shop as the leek buyer and a man in the street, amuses us with a seemingly casual but in essence automatic reaction: ‘San Giovanni defend us!’ (R, 22:216). The imminence of the French invasion serves as an instance of how sentiments are not only evoked but also conditioned by changes of the moment. The popular

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

84

85

conviction that this invasion marks a crucial historical moment rests ‘less on the necessarily momentous character of a powerful foreign invasion than on certain moral emotions to which the aspect of the times gave the form of presentiments’ (R, 21:209). Nevertheless, the need to worship deities is soon followed up with efforts to defend Florence with its craft and coffers. The ‘struggle between the old patron and the new’ gives a strong sense of modernity to traditional values (R, 8:81). The characters’ long-held beliefs have to accommodate each new wave of change. It is in this sense that we should understand why Tito refuses to reveal his origins initially. He wants to play down or up various elements in his origins according to what works best for him at a particular moment. The moral of his story, though, suggests that events of the moment will condition his sentiments: they enable the mark of his origins to become his identity, no matter how much he moves geographically or how much he plays around the needs of a specific historical situation. For the same reason, the narrator comments on Savonarola’s forced confession under torture by asking rhetorically: ‘perhaps this confession, even when it described a doubleness that was conscious and deliberate, really implied no more than that wavering of belief concerning his own impressions and motives which most human beings who have not a stupid inflexibility of self-confidence must be liable to under a marked change of external conditions?’ (R, 71:579). The humanly shared basis was part of Eliot’s concern since she initially meant to follow this up with another example of Romola.37 The strong emphasis on basic human sentiments provides the best terms in which to define the nature and meaning of Savonarola’s reform of ‘public virtue and spiritual purity’ (R, 55:462). Reform must target the cyclic manifestation of shared mentalities. It also places Savonarola in the realm of continuous history which is occasioned by, though hardly confined to, specific changes. Thus he can take advantage of the fact that as an individual of a specific historical moment, he may appeal to a long communal history by appearing to represent these sentiments, ‘emotions which had found a very remarkable utterance in the voice of a single man’ (R, 21:209). Seen in such terms, his reform of civil virtues ought to have been, though it is not, a most sustainable remedy for the moral chaos of Florence, because it would have located the root of the problem in sentiments rather than their expressions, which are only transitory religious or political institutions of the moment. The target of Savonarola’s reform is still the age-old deficiencies in human nature, almost exact to biblical specifications: ‘lust and

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

obscenity, lying and treachery, oppression and murder … tyranny, avarice, and lasciviousness’ (R, 21:210), but the Florentine conditions place them back in secular time without unhinging them altogether from the Christian trope of apocalypse. As for himself, what ‘had driven him into the cloister’ is ‘the contradiction between men’s lives and their professed beliefs’. The divine structure of his belief rests largely on a personal and almost pagan thrust of feelings and passion, ‘his own burning indignation at the sight of wrong’, in spite of the fact that entering the Church may paradoxically prove that ‘his appetite for the world’ has been destroyed (R, 21:211). He still relies on biblical terms to indicate the nature of his reform, his ‘labyrinthine allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures’ (R, 25:237) and looks in ‘the Sacred Book’ for ‘a record of the past in which might be seen as in a glass what would be in the days to come’ (R, 21:211). ‘I tell you the French King with his army is the minister of God’, he tells his congregation (R, 24:230). He needs to convince his congregation that he is simply living out a prophecy, predetermined and anticipated. This is perhaps why in his preaching ‘there were strains that appealed to the very finest susceptibilities of men’s natures, and there were elements that gratified low egoism, tickled gossiping curiosity, and fascinated timorous superstition’ (R, 25:237). Such a double-edged practice makes his voice touch the pagan heart of Baldassarre and ‘[possess]’ (R, 25:234) him who, at the end of his sermon, ‘burst into a sob with the rest’ (R, 24:233). Not surprisingly, ‘the false certitude’ (R, 25:238) of his sermons has won him a very ‘heterogeneous’ (R, 25:237) audience, from enemies to disciples. The winning act may not be a real success because to the narrator it may remain an external force. It may work as music that moves such listeners as Romola, but it creates no ‘sense of being possessed by actual vibrating harmonies … and lies quite outside the inner chamber and sanctuary of her life’ (R, 27:251). The narrator successfully grounds Savonarola’s seemingly transcendental rhetoric back in history by passing judgements on his appropriation of biblical language to interpret contemporary events and to justify his civic reform. His prophecy finds authority in the recurrence of the ‘strong attestation from the peculiar conditions of the age’ (R, 21:210): ‘the faith in a supreme and righteous Ruler became one with the faith in a speedy divine interposition that would punish and reclaim’ (R, 21:211). ‘As long as four years ago he had proclaimed … that a scourge was about to descend on Italy, and that by this scourge the Church was to be purified … and … that he had a mission like that of the

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

86

87

Hebrew prophets, and that the Florentines amongst whom his message was delivered were in some sense a second chosen people’ (R, 21:209–10). The true nature of his grand scheme of interpretation is made clear by way of narratorial irony: he himself stands out ‘conspicuously as a grand exception’ from others whose ‘gift of prophecy was very much like a farthing candle illuminating small corners of human destiny with prophetic gossip’ (R, 21:210). It is the precision and profundity with which he is able to understand the complexity of his moment that have made his failure of reform all the more tragic. The reader has to wonder in the end whether he fails because of the limits of his ‘grand’ vision or because of his inability to reshape public sentiments due to the unabridgeable chasm between his biblical and worldly readings of human psychology. Eliot’s effort in Romola to historicize the transcendental goal promises an organic interdependence between recurrence and change. It also implies that without organic fusion coexistence offers no emotional benefit, as coexistence only allows for a mere alternating between two entities. In Savonarola, ‘opposing tendencies co-exist in almost equal strength’ but ‘alternated in him with a keen perception of outward facts and a vigorous practical judgment of men and things’ (R, 64:531). It is this relational perspective that enables the narrator to stop short of making every event teleological and to exhibit much intellectual acumen and virtuosity. This view allows Savonarola’s reform to become, in one sense, a one-off occurrence, which can be overlooked if we merely focus on his reform as a legend to posterity. The reform fails and ends with Savonarola seeking ‘the rapture and glory of martyrdom without its agony’ (R, 24:232). His attempts may have facilitated Romola’s inner conflicts, yet the raison d’être of these attempts certainly does not reside merely in that function. The morally chaotic moment of Florentine sentiments, of which Savonarola’s reform is only a symptom rather than a cure, also exemplifies the Carlylean concept of disruption in history which is largely discontinuous. Bardo, not surprisingly, sees recent happenings in Florence in Carlylean terms: ‘our manners have degenerated somewhat from that noble frugality which … is the parent of true magnificance’ (R, 12:126). Moments of anarchy and lack of spiritual force may call for retribution in history, but not necessarily always. When Romola questions Savonarola about the rigidity of Christianity, the narrator hastens to add: ‘Our relations with our fellow-men are most often determined by coincident currents of that sort’ (R, 59:493). The fact that ‘perfect scheming demands omniscience’ (R, 63:526)

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

only indicates that details of the moment may sometimes defy any direct relation to teleology and purposefulness. Although Savonarola holds a very important position in Italian history, the failure of his reform may be regarded, in one sense, as a moment not rescued in the history represented in Romola. It becomes history to the extent that it has been a historical event; yet the intensity accompanying moments of moral struggle is maintained largely, though not exclusively, by a mechanism of oblivion. To understand the complexity of such oblivion as a necessary part of history, we need to come back to the limits of narrative.

Transcending the limits of narrative This representation of the dialectics between ever-present continuity and the moment of historical accidents overcomes the limits of Positivist religion. The implied relations between these two models of time also transcend the limits of narrative. J. Hillis Miller has highlighted ‘the way linear terminology and linear form used to discuss realistic fiction subverts itself by becoming “complex”’.38 Linear or otherwise, the narrative sequence may not always be able to capture the intensity of the moment, since intensity demands drama and concentration, which necessitates an oblivion to what it may hold for development. Moreover, the moment consists in a multidimensional performance. Narrative duration is fundamentally different from this multiplicity because, even when it is absorbed in its own drama of the moment, such absorption has to generate an impetus for the future to become possible. This returns us to the weaving function of memory and forgetfulness. In Romola, the ‘web’ of psychological movements intimates ways in which different feelings may collide head-on with each other. While giving an added dimension to linear sequence, these movements may form a centrifugal force that preserves the complex nature of communal memory with its potential for inconsequence and unpurposefulness. The significance of bringing out the non-linear dimension is to see multidimensional human experience through the limits of narrative. These limits are best described in Carlyle’s observation that ‘[an] Historian must write (so to speak) in lines; but every event is a superficies; nay if we search out its causes, a solid: hence a primary and almost incurable defect in the art of Narration’,39 and that historians must face the ‘ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being’ (‘On History’, WTC, XXVII, 88). Yet oblivion implies sequence,

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

88

Romola and the Moment in History

89

Memory and Oblivion, like Day and Night, and indeed like all other Contradictions in this strange dualistic Life of ours, are necessary for each other’s existence: Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness. As with man and these autobiographic Annual-Registers of his, so goes it with Mankind and its Universal History, which also is its Autobiography: a like unconscious talent of remembering and of forgetting again does the work here. (‘On History Again’, WTC, XXVIII, 173; original emphasis) Oblivion is necessary in Romola in bringing memory into existence. If in Carlyle, it is by way of difference that oblivion draws memory onto itself as memory draws oblivion onto itself,40 in Romola it is by way of ‘transmutation’. Without always seeing memory as necessarily entailing oblivion, Romola presents both as unstable since one may easily assume the role of the other. To recognize discontinuous oblivion as an integral part of continuous memory is to transcend the limits of the direction and duration of sequence. It is in this sense that the intensity of absence becomes a way of recovering a forgotten past. The meaning of the one will only be revealed through the other, even when oblivion is not recoverable.41 While the intensity of a character’s moral awareness depends on the ebb and flow of his or her ability to recognize and remember, memory itself, especially involuntary memory, may become a means to sever the past from the present moment and to negate any course of teleology. In presenting this ‘tangled web’ (R, 36:329), Romola offers us a unique genre: the present moment may be obliterated by moral meanings from the past; in this obliteration or oblivion moral meanings lose their teleology for they have nothing to bear upon. Once Romola comes to know Baldassarre’s past, she is ‘too entirely possessed by the images of the past to take any note of Baldassarre’s question’ (R, 53:453). Oblivion here does not mean deliberate ignorance but the strong sensation caused by memory which disrupts Romola’s orientation in the present. It is an interesting reversal of Lewes’s theory that memory may help to form new perceptions. In Lewes, such perception

10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

too. Carlyle was able to perceive an intrinsic connection between mental continuity and the shape of history and uses the counterpointing metaphors of memory and oblivion to address the issue:

Romola and the Moment in History

is rarely transformed back into sensation. This ‘reversed’ sensation works on Romola: ‘That heart-cutting comparison of the present with the past urged itself upon Romola till it even transformed itself into wretched sensations: she seemed benumbed to everything but inward throbbings’ (R, 36:326). Such a mental process also complicates the teleology of the Bildungsroman conventions. Memory of a past incident, when transformed into a perception, is subject to the workings of other formative influences, which may unsettle the moral meaning