Abstract
What could be simpler than Silas Marner’s support for family values? Forsaking her customary tact, Eliot fills the story with simple maxims and paeans promoting a life with wives and children, and emphatic caveats about a life without them. A faith in the family she is elsewhere content confiding to the implications of her narrative is here urged, and urged again, as conspicuous doctrine. Pulling out the stops, Eliot pours her formidable but usually discreet didactic energy into a straightforward channel of simple exhortation: ‘the Squire’s wife had died long ago, and the Red House was without that presence of the wife and mother which is the fountain of wholesome love and fear in parlour and kitchen’;1 men without women inhabit houses ‘destitute of any hallowing charm’ (p. 73) and filled instead with the ‘scent of flat ale’ (p. 73); men without women live in a region barren of the ‘sweet flowers of courtesy’ (p. 121); men without women dwell in a twilight zone of tedium vitae whose only source of light is the memory of what is lost to them:
pass[ing] their days in the half-listless gratification of senses dulled by monotony … perhaps the love of some sweet maiden, the image of purity, order, and calm, had opened their eyes to the vision of a life in which the days would not seem too long, even without rioting; but the maiden was lost, and the vision passed away, and then what was left to them, especially when they had become too heavy for the hunt …?
(p. 79)
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Notes
George Eliot, Silas Marner (New York, 1985), p. 72. All further references contained in the text.
On the nineteenth-century construction of homosexuality as a desire defined by the similarity, even the identity, between its subject and object, as a construction which displaces the older notion of inversion, which involved no notion of similarity or sameness between these terms, see Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (New York, 1979), pp. 23–32. See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s assessment of the current hegemony of this construction: ‘homosexuality… is now almost universally heard as referring to relations of sexuality between persons who are, because of their sex, more flatly and globally categorised as the same’.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA, 1990), pp. 158–9.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (London, 1977), p. 94. This is of course not to say that such rules are exclusively implicit; they are grasped as well by the formal mechanisms of social power. For a discussion of nineteenth-century legal prosecution of homosexuality see note 3; for a potent contemporary example of the legal codification of homophobia, see the majority opinion of the Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986).
George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York, 1988), p. 355.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (New York, 1988), p. 389.
See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Drive (New York, 1985).
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (New York, 1985), p. 140.
For a critique of such accounts, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980), pp. 15–49.
George Eliot, Adam Bede (New York, 1988), p. 183.
George Eliot, Mill on the Floss (New York, 1980), pp. 78–9.
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern no shade of quality escapes it… a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge’ (Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 183); See also T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, in The Sacred Wood (London, 1920).
D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, CA, 1988), pp. 147, 148.
For lucid critical accounts of feminist theorisations of sex as the incarnation of gender, see Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York, 1989), pp. 39–72;
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990)
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979) and History of Sexuality. Such unifications of body and mind may be noticed at times to work like the analogies we have considered in the Eliot novel to maintain the distinction between these terms even as it remarks the suspension of that distinction. The embodiment of social principles may be read as an event, where what is fundamentally or primordially abstract is made flesh.
For other accounts of intercourse between sexuality and capital, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley, CA, 1987), pp. 29–58; 113–36.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York, 1985), pp. 256–60. As Scarry herself acknowledges elsewhere in The Body in Pain, her reading of the Marxist scenario may be taken to literalise excessively the presence of the body of labour in the object of labour (pp. 245–6). To that extent, The Body in Pain participates in, rather than merely describes the bias towards embodiment available in a variety of nineteenth-century considerations of economic value, such as Silas Marner.
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Nunokawa, J. (2002). The Miser’s Two Bodies: Silas Marner and the Sexual Possibilities of the Commodity. In: Yousaf, N., Maunder, A. (eds) The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. New Casebooks. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21296-1_9
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