Postcolonial George Eliot

313 Pages·2017·3.744 MB·English

by  Oliver Lovesey (auth.)

Postcolonial
George Eliot
Oliver Lovesey
Postcolonial George Eliot
Oliver Lovesey
Postcolonial George
Eliot
Oliver Lovesey
University of British Columbia, Okanagan
Kelowna, BC
Canada
ISBN 978-1-137-33211-0 ISBN 978-1-137-33212-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-33212-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939072
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A
cknowledgements
I wish to thank Gillian Cooke, Group Archivist; Jacky Emerson, Archive
Service Delivery Officer; and Rebekah Johnston, Archives Assistant, at
the Cambridge Assessment Group Archives, Cambridge University, for
their assistance in accessing Cambridge Local Examination materials.
In addition, I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to Jenny Ulph,
College Archivist at Downing College, Cambridge University, for facili-
tating my access to Downing College’s F.R. Leavis Collection. Dr. Robin
Leavis, the holder of the copyright for this collection, denied permis-
sion for me to quote from his father’s letters. I also wish to thank Diane
Stoliker, Librarian at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan
(UBCO), for research assistance. A UBCO SSHRC Institutional
Humanities and Social Sciences Research Grant and a grant from Faculty
of Creative and Critical Studies’ Research Support Fund assisted in the
completion of this project. My thanks to Marie Loughlin for her love
and support cannot be calculated. Any and all errors are mine.
I dedicate this work to the memory of my grandfather Roland
Lovesey (born 1891 in Bushey, Herts., England; died 1917 at Fleurbaix,
Flanders, France).
v
c
ontents
1 Introduction: George Eliot and the Victorian Postcolonial 1
2 Decolonizing Victorian Anthropology (Scenes of Clerical
Life and Adam Bede) 51
3 George Eliot and Victorian Islamophobia (Felix Holt ’s
Colonial Subject) 107
4 Middlemarch’s Colonial Imaginary 159
5 Conclusion: The Leavis Tradition, Educational
Assessment, and the Postcolonial Library 217
Works Cited 243
Index 277
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: George Eliot and the
Victorian Postcolonial
George Eliot has not had the recent popular success of Austen, Dickens
or Brontë with the heritage or nostalgia industries, despite celebratory
expressions from Rebecca Mead and others.1 It is questionable, more-
over, whether Eliot was ever in the running to be the face of the £10
note, and there’s not yet been the addition of a vampire or ripped bod-
ice to an adaption of Middlemarch.2 Not all Victorians were fans, of
course, and famously John Ruskin, in an essay published in 1881 just
after her death, dismissed Eliot’s concern, particularly in The Mill on the
Floss, with insignificant, unheroic characters, a concern rendering her
a “common railroad-station novelist” (Ruskin 167), in a period when,
ironically, morally fortifying extracts from her works would appear on
the walls of railway stations (Price 114). In 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche
would characterize Eliot as one who renounced Christian faith only to
“cling to Christian morality” (Twilight of the Idols). In Eliot’s Victorian
afterlives in fictionalized biographies,3 much attention is paid to the very
English sex scandal behind Eliot’s new husband, 20 years her junior,
jumping into a Venice canal to escape the honeymoon suite, after which
he returned to England and was hospitalized for stress.4 When you are
“George Eliot,” what happens in Venice doesn’t stay in Venice.5 The less
sensational Eliot was a sort of Victorian web-master of a particular type
with an omnivorous appetite for knowledge in all its forms, and her work
is famous for carrying the odour of the candle, the reflected glare of the
screen, or the ubiquity of the footnote.6
© The Author(s) 2017 1
O. Lovesey, Postcolonial George Eliot,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-33212-7_1
2 O. LOVESEY
“Why should anyone care about George Eliot?” asks Julian Wolfreys
provocatively in his foreword to J. Hillis Miller’s most recent return
to Eliot that begins with a consideration of whether even “reading”
Middlemarch can any longer be “justified” (Wolfreys vii; J.H. Miller,
Reading xi). Eliot’s very popularity among intellectuals may place
a firewall between her and the type of general reader her novels also
first attracted. There is an ever-renewed proliferation of explanatory,
contextualizing introductions, guides, and companions, if not keys,
to all George Eliots, and there are a number as Terry Eagleton noted
(“Foreword” xvii). The trend of course began, after a fashion, in Eliot’s
own lifetime, when it appears that Eliot’s life partner, the savvy mar-
keter G.H. Lewes, persuaded the somewhat ambivalent Eliot to permit
a collection of “Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings,” edited by Alexander
Main, one example of a myriad of published extracts and anthologies,
some of them with particularly vulgar or garish designs destined for the
colonial market (Price 120, 122).7 Perhaps it is Eliot’s ever-renewed
scholarly success—every age inventing its own George Eliot from mod-
ern and postmodern to cosmopolitan, transnational, gothic,8 and per-
haps postcolonial—that has fated her to remain a staple on university
syllabi, but kept her from being liked, let alone friended, followed, or
re-tweeted by “Generation Like.” Rumours of a disregard for or indif-
ference to her work, as with rumours of the demise of novels, authors,
intellectuals, or even the postcolonial, the latter in Robert J.C. Young’s
assessment, are greatly exaggerated, and recent work towards the recov-
ery of an international, imperial, or postcolonial George Eliot is wit-
nessed by the critiques of Amanda Anderson, Nancy Henry, and Aamir
R. Mufti.9
Postcolonial George Eliot aims to provide an examination of Eliot’s
work in the light of postcolonial discourse and Eliot’s location in the
colonial library, as well as her work’s engagement with the colonial
world of her time and pre-modern colonialisms. Its postcolonializing
Victorianism engages with Edward Said’s “travelling theory,” the notion
that a theory’s move to a different historical location with a new geo-
political atmosphere may result in productive reconceptualizations or,
conversely, institutionalize its reduction, distortion, and reification (The
World 230). A theory’s travels may also result, he warns, in the creation
of a new orthodoxy, which might well be said of the project of post-
colonial studies itself, as Arif Dirlik has suggested (330). Said’s travel-
ling theory trajectory, moreover, as James Clifford has noted, may well
1 INTRODUCTION: GEORGE ELIOT AND THE VICTORIAN POSTCOLONIAL 3
be too narrow and linear for postcolonial contexts, and the travels of
postcolonial theory and postcolonial theorists are a much more com-
plex story (Clifford, “Notes on Travel and Theory”). As a Victorian cul-
tural intellectual and novelist whose work emerged from the heart of the
imperium, Eliot embraced a version of cosmopolitan otherness in terms
of culture, ethics, gender, race, and religion. She was, moreover, well
aware of her writings’ location within the new imperial world order: “we
are a colonising people, and it is we who have punished others” (“The
Modern” 138).10 While her own work is often read within postcolonial
studies, and particularly the work of Said, as hegemonic in its advocacy
of projects for nations and peoples, she was no apologist for empire, and
she denounced intellectual insularity, homogenizing master narratives,
and xenophobia, though her stance is never unproblematic. Moreover,
Eliot’s inevitable embedding within the imperial globalization of her
time and Victorian ideological obtuseness has been read almost exclu-
sively in terms of Daniel Deronda’s deferred Zionist closure in Palestine
as well as some of her final essays’ apparent assumptions about racial
assimilation.
This study of Eliot’s work in a postcolonial context examines her
interventions in a broad range of discourses with postcolonial inflections:
internal and regional colonialisms and imperialism in the ancient world;
the encounter of East and West in North Africa; migration, exile, and the
quest for a Romany or Jewish homeland; Victorian ambivalence about
Islam’s future; and the position of Eliot within international education
and her influence on postcolonial literature. It takes into account Eliot’s
awareness, partly achieved by her reading of Scott’s novels, of Britain’s
internal colonization and the model of domestic colonial emigration, as
well as Eliot’s sympathetic advocacy for “other” Europes or Europe’s
peripheries, poised between civilization and barbarism in contempo-
rary perceptions, including colonized Poland as well as Spain, south-
ern Italy,11 and Turkey. It also acknowledges Eliot’s active support for
imagined homelands for the Roma and the Jews, as well as her personal,
emotional, and financial investment in colonies such as South Africa and
India.12 This study aims to open a space for rethinking George Eliot
studies, expanding the insights of postcolonial theory, and challenging a
monolithic, homogeneous, even hegemonic view of the Victorians.
This is an opportune time for such a study, when the postcolonial,
post-dictatorship Arab Spring enters its fall and winter,13 the global
migrancy crisis is exacerbated by climate change as well as globalized,
4 O. LOVESEY
failed states, and the “war on terror” forecloses dissent. A number of
these problems grow from or replicate Victorian East–West misunder-
standing. In fact, many of the global problems of the early twenty-first
century present have deep roots in nineteenth-century European impe-
rialism. Other than somewhat trivial diplomatic outrages, it was con-
trol of empire that lay behind the First World War’s 10 million dead, an
unimaginable, mechanized slaughter beginning just 34 years after Eliot’s
death.14 The indirect justification was the de-Islamization of Jerusalem
that was to be accomplished partly by administering the coup de grace
to the Ottoman empire. The solution to the Arab Question was a direct
consequence of answers proposed to the Jewish Question advanced
early by writers like Eliot. Our postcolonial present in its postmodern,
late capitalist condition thus enters a newly historicized present, though
the postcolony was never a victim of wilful historical amnesia, of the sort
Fredric Jameson deplores,15 because it has been fated never to forget its
past or “how to think historically” (Jameson, Postmodernism ix).16 The
early 2016 “Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past” show
at Tate Britain—itself built with profits from sugar plantations—high-
lights empire’s “prestige” and its “litany of exploitation, famine, cruelty
and slaughter” as Paul Gilroy put it (8). The show itself, a history of
empire in 200 art objects, however, provoked “in parts of the British
press, a reflex defence of empire” (Jaggi). This hostility and contempo-
rary reassessment of a conflicted and still contested past may indicate
an entry into “an age of re-revisionism” or the “Post post-colonial”
(Mount 17).17
Moreover, along with revivals of British Raj nostalgia and a soft-
focus Victoriana (Sadoff and Kucich, “Histories of the Present” xii),
new imperial historians, as witnessed by the contributions to the Oxford
History of the British Empire, are taking stridently anti-postcolonial posi-
tions or at least ignoring the developments of postcolonial studies in
reassessments of the British empire. While it is a massive compendium
of valuable information, the Oxford History of the British Empire is also
a revealingly panoramic snapshot of a discipline at a particular histori-
cal moment, and its historical “revisions” or “reassessments” are virtual
apologies for empire, often denouncing the work of postcolonial theo-
rists as vague, literary, and ahistorical, or more commonly overlooking
it altogether.18 The study of empire in this revisionary perspective ceases
to be an account of power inequities and resistance on the ground,
and demands for justice, reconciliation, and reparations, but rather