Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation

270 Pages·1987·16.713 MB·English

by  Daniel Cottom

Social Figures
Theory and History of Literature
Edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse
Volume 44. Daniel Cottom Social Figures: George Eliot,
Social History, and Literary Representation
Volume 43. Michael Nerlich Ideology of Adventure, Volume 2
Volume 42. Michael Nerlich Ideology of Adventure, Volume 1
Volume 41. Denis Hollier The College of Sociology
Volume 40. Peter Sloterdijk Critique of Cynical Reason
Volume 39. Geza von Molnar Romantic Vision, Ethical Context:
Novalis and Artistic Autonomy
Volume 38. Algirdas Julien Greimas
On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory
Volume 37. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok
The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonomy
Volume 36. Alice Yaeger Kaplan Reproductions of Banality:
Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life
Volume 35. Denis Hollier The Politics of Prose
Volume 34. Geoffrey Hartman The Unremarkable Wordsworth
Volume 33. Paul de Man The Resistance to Theory
Volume 32. Djelal Kadir Questing Fictions:
Latin America's Family Romance
Volume 31. Samuel Weber Institution and Interpretation
Volume 30. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
Volume 29. Peter Szondi Theory of the Modern Drama
Volume 28. Edited by Jonathan Arac Postmodernism and Politics
Volume 27. Stephen Melville Philosophy Beside Itself:
On Deconstruction and Modernism
Volume 26. Andrzej Warminski Readings in Interpretation:
Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger
Volume 25. Jose Antonio Maravall Culture of the Baroque:
Analysis of a Historical Structure
Volume 24. Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement
The Newly Born Woman
Volume 23. Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies.
2. Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror
For other books in the series, see p. 242.
Social Figures
George Eliot, Social History,
and Literary Representation
Daniel Cottom
Foreword by Terry Eagleton
Theory and History of Literature, Volume 44
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Copyright 1987 by the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written pemission of the publisher.
A revised version of "The Romance of George Eliot's Realism,"
Genre 15 (Winter 1982): 357-77 appears in chapter 6, "Realism and
Romance."
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, MN 55414.
Published simultaneously in Canada
by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Markham.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cottom, Daniel.
Social figures.
(Theory and history of literature; v. 44)
Includes index.
1. Eliot, George, 1819-1880—Political and social views. 2. Social
history in literature. 3. Social problems in literature. 4. Literature and
society—England. I. Title. II. Series.
PR4692.S58C68 1987 823'.8 86-19249
ISBN 0-8166-1547-0
ISBN 0-8166-1548-9 (pbk.)
The University of Minnesota
is an equal-opportunity
educator and employer.
For Deborah
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Contents
Foreword by Terry Eagleton viii
Preface xviii
Acknowledgments xxv
1. "George Eliot" and the Fables of the Liberal Intellectual 3
2. Education and the Transfigurations of Realism 33
3. Literary Consciousness and the Vacancy of the Individual 59
4. Genteel Image and Democratic Example 83
5. Imperfection and Compensation 103
6. Realism and Romance 125
7. The Supervision of Art and the Culture of the Sickroom 141
8. Private Fragments and Public Monuments 161
9. Domesticity and Teratology 183
Conclusion: Reproduction/Quotation/Criticism20 201
Notes 221
Index 237
Foreword
Tern/ Eagleton
If "military intelligence" is one of the more striking oxymorons of modern
society, the "crisis of the humanities" is perhaps one of its most notable
tautologies. To see the humanities as a firmly grounded formation that at a
particular point in its historical development enters into difficulty and self-
doubt is to miss the truth that "crisis" and the "humanities" were born at a
stroke. Crisis is permanent and structural to the humanities, not a regrettable
confusion or failure of nerve that afflicts them from time to time. If the
humanities are taken to be a body of discourses enshrining the richest, most im-
perishable values of humanity, how could they not be pitched into continual
crisis in a social order where violence, repression, and cultural deprivation are
the order of the day? In such conditions, it is part of the chronic bemusement
of the humanities never to know whether they are central or peripheral, grudg-
ingly tolerated parasites or indispensable ideological apparatuses. Radical cri-
tiques of their activitities can be launched from either of these two quite op-
posed viewpoints: in a celebrated pincer movement, the impotence of the
humanities in the face of a philistine capitalism may be lamented at just the mo-
ment when their pernicious dissemination of bourgeois values is being
denounced.
If the humanities seem merely supplementary to a society with quite dif-
ferent priorities of value, that supplementarity would nevertheless appear to
fulfill a structural and hence, paradoxically, "central" function. It is part of
the vital role of humane discourses within capitalism to occupy a modestly
marginal position, always conveniently at hand to offer support when required
viii
FOREWORD D ix
to the currently hegemonic models of "humanity," but not, it is hoped, re-
quired too often. When historians, political theorists, and literary critics are
summoned from their libraries to debate the fundamental "human" values by
which modern societies live, it is a sure sign that all is not well with the ruling
order, which is on principle uneasy about such searching self-reflection and
rightly discerns in it the symptoms of ideological disarray. The humanities are
in this sense most efficacious when least visible, the taken-for-granted conven-
tional wisdom or spiritual stock-in-trade of a society that can then busy itself
with more properly pragmatic affairs. It may do so secure in the knowledge
that someone else, in the great division-of-labor scheme, will always be mobi-
lized to furnish an impressive-sounding rationale for these more pragmatic pur-
suits, should it prove necessary. For their part, the role of the humanities is to
refine and elaborate the spiritual stock-in-trade of society to a point specialist
enough to justify their own autonomous existence as professional disciplines,
but closely allied enough to that empirical wisdom to allow them to appear
ideologically acceptable and even useful. This is not always a tension easy to
maintain, as the traditional quarrel between "literary scholarship" and
"literary criticism" demonstrates.
The structurally essential marginality of the humanities is one of the many
features bequeathed to them by their historical predecessor, religion. As the
man said, it is when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it is
time to give it up. One of the traditional roles of religion was to provide the
kind of spontaneous, intuitively accessible, taken-for-granted context to one's
quotidian activities that, like the Almighty, was so unspeakably fundamental
and omnipresent as to be effectively irrelevant. That these mysterious matters
should be thrust rudely into self-reflectiveness would be of benefit neither to
religion nor to practical life, as anyone who has taken a stroll around Belfast
may attest. It is perhaps in part because the United States of America spends its
time being tediously pitched from one imperialist crisis to another that its
religious and other ideological discourses have about them a solemnity and ex-
plicitness odd and embarrassing to European ears. An American politician will
invoke God, freedom, or patriotism in a way that a European public (and not
just the professionally cynical intelligentsia) would find tasteless or overblown;
there is a Victorian earnestness about American ideological language, a high,
hollow seriousness, which rings strangely in the ears of those European societies
that have long lived past their founding revolutionary moments and have had
more time to diffuse and naturalize ideological doctrine as "culture," "man-
ners," or "civilization" rather than histrionic appeals to nature or heaven. This
is also the case with American debates in the humanities, which are
characteristically more urgent, vigorous, and portentous than the shyly mur-
mured obliquities of the jaded British.
Like religion, the humanities represent the heart of a heartless world, a
phrase which Marx by no means intended wholly dismiss!vely. The heart is so