Abstract
George Eliot, like Austen and Gaskell before her, was equally engaged with the reformulation of Romanticism and models of masculinity. For U. C. Knoepflmacher, Eliot’s ‘fiction offers what is probably the richest and most variegated cast of male characters created by any woman nov-elist’.1 The fleshing out or dissolving of masculine stereotypes is a distinctive feature of Eliot’s fiction, with the title characters in works such as Adam Bede (1859), Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt: The Radical (1866) and Daniel Deronda (1876) remaining in the foreground. Adam Bede, Eliot’s first novel, explores conventional as well as emerging models of masculinity through the theme of work, the interrelated issue of class, and the family.2 The charming yet feckless aristocratic seducer, Captain Arthur Donnithorne, is found wanting when compared with the integrity of the carpenter, Adam Bede. Middlemarch (1871–72) is populated by, among many others, the mutable shades of Will Ladislaw’s artistic sensibilities and Casaubon’s pitiful frailties. In her last novel, Daniel Deronda, the title character’s delicacy of feeling and Mordecai’s spirit of self-sacrifice provide the counterpoint to Grandcourt’s hard, yet meticulously studied, masculinity. Both Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch will be discussed in detail in the next chapter.
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Notes
U. C. Knoepflmacher, ‘Unveiling Men: Power and Masculinity in George Eliot’s Fiction’, in Men by Women, ed. by Janet Todd (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1981), pp. 130–46 (p. 134). Knoepflmacher’s argument about Eliot’s ‘gender dysfunctions’ is less convincing (p. 131).
See, for example, John R. Reed, ‘Soldier Boy: Forming Masculinity in Adam Bede’, Studies in the Novel, 33:3 (2001), pp. 268–84. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick regards Adam Bede as an exemplar of ‘the historicity of women’s relations to men’s bonds’, in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York and Chichester: Columbia UP, 1985), p. 135.
George Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. by Margaret Reynolds (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 197. Subsequent references will be given in the text.
William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (1802)’, in William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. by Stephen Gill, rpt (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), pp. 595–615 (p. 597). Subsequent references to the Preface are taken from this edition and will be given in the text. Eliot’s relationship with the ‘incomparable Wordsworth’, as she referred to the poet, was ‘always ardent’, according to Stephen Gill. Eliot wrote of Wordsworth’s poetry: ‘I have never before met with so many of my own feelings, expressed just as I could like’, and purchased a six-volume set of his works a year later when she was 21. His poetry features more frequently in Eliot’s epigraphs and chapter headings than any other author except Shakespeare.
See Stephen Gill, ‘Wordsworth at Full-Length: George Eliot’, in Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), pp. 145–67 (pp. 145, 147).
Donald D. Stone, The Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1980), p. 192.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), 1850, Book XII, 11. 208, 248–61. In addition to The Excursion, which Eliot read and admired in its entirety on a number of occasions, she ‘knew The Prelude equally well’, re-reading the work up until her death (Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, p. 146). The Mill on the Floss (1860), a novel immersed in a Wordsworthian dialogue over childhood, memory, and place, opens with what could be considered a ‘spot of time’. Eliot also borrows from The Excursion to highlight the history of St Ogg’s as ‘a town ‘familiar with forgotten years’. See The Mill on the Floss, ed. by A. S. Byatt, rpt (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 124. Subsequent references will be given in the text.
George Eliot, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’, in Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. by Thomas A. Noble, rpt (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), p. 36 (added emphasis).
George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, rpt (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1995), p. 688. Subsequent references will be given in the text.
George Eliot, ‘Thomas Carlyle’, Leader, 6 (27 October 1855), pp. 1034–5, in George Eliot: Selected Critical Writings, ed. by Rosemary Ashton, rpt (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), pp. 187–92 (p. 187). Subsequent references in this paragraph are to this edition, p. 188.
George Levine, ‘The Hero as Dilettante: Middlemarch and Nostromo’, in George Eliot: Centenary Essays and an Unpublished Fragment, ed. by Anne Smith (London: Vision Press, 1980), pp. 152–80 (p. 159). Virginia Woolf, writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1919, regretted that Dorothea could not have been provided with a better mate. Jane Marie Luecke defended Ladislaw’s character against his detractors in ‘Ladislaw and the Middlemarch Vision’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 19:1 (1964), pp. 55–64; and, later, Juliet McMaster confessed to being ‘a long-time admirer of the much maligned hero of Middlemarch’, in ‘Will Ladislaw and Other Italians with White Mice’, Victorian Review, 16:2 (1990), pp. 1–7 (p. 1).
Stowe sent Eliot a copy ahead of publication in the Atlantic Monthly. See Ruby V. Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self (London: Bodley Head, 1975), pp. 45–7.
The sonnet sequence, ‘Brother and Sister’, was published in The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874). Denise Tischler Millstein argues for a literary conversation between Eliot’s poems and Byron’s ‘Epistle to Augusta’: The sonnet sequence, which reads like a letter from a cast-off sister to her brother, is a mirror version of Byron’s ‘Epistle to Augusta’, from a beloved brother to his cast-off sister. It is almost as if the two poems create a whole when read together, with Eliot as the sister of her poem responding to Byron as the brother of his. (original emphasis) Tischler Millstein, ‘George Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radical and Byronic Secrets’, in Victorian Secrecy: Economies of Knowledge and Concealment, ed. by Albert D. Pionke and Denise Tischler Millstein (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 135–48 (p. 139).
Millstein’s essay also includes a useful discussion of the Stowe affair and its after-effects on Byron’s reputation. The phrase, ‘Byron whirlwind’, is quoted in ‘Byronic Secrets’, p. 136. On the same subject, see Caroline Franklin, Byron and Women Novelists, The Byron Foundation Lecture (Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 2001),
and Susan J. Wolfson, Romantic Interactions: Social Being & the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010).
The separation of the fault from the perpetrator is a ‘theological commonplace, susceptible of casuistical interpretation’, as Stevie Davies notes, identifying a similar instance in Charlotte Brontë’s early story, Captain Henry Hastings. See Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, ed. by Stevie Davies (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 150, 506.
See The Journals of George Eliot, ed. by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), pp. 26, 234; and Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), p. 151.
Alicia Carroll, ‘The Giaour’s Campaign: Desire and the Other in Felix Holt, The Radical’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 30:2 (1997), pp. 237–58 (pp. 242, 241).
Cited in Dorothy Mermin, Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993), p. 6. The description of Eliot’s letter as ‘singularly priggish’, quoted in the next paragraph, is Mermin’s (p. 13).
See Jenny Uglow, George Eliot (London: Virago, 1987), pp. 22–3. Eliot writes, ‘My imagination is an enemy that must be cast down ere I can enjoy peace or exhibit uniformity of character’ (17 September 1840).
K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist: A Study of the Philosophical Structure of her Novels (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 50, 28. William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, among others, identified Byron with the circumscribing limitations of egotism.
‘Brother Jacob’ was published in the Cornhill Magazine in July 1864 after the tale — under the Wordsworthian title ‘The Idiot Boy’ — was rejected by Sampson Low. See The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob, ed. by Helen Small, rpt (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), p. xxxix. Subsequent references will be given in the text.
George Eliot, ‘Evangelical Teaching: Dr Cumming’, Westminster Review, lxiv (October 1855), pp. 436–62, in Selected Critical Writings, pp. 138–70 (p. 148).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron, in Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, ed. by John Robert Glorney Bolton and Julia Bolton Holloway (London: Penguin, 1995).
William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’, 1. 31, in William Wordsworth: The Pedlar, Tintern Abbey and the Two-Part Prelude, ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985).
Frederick Burwick, ‘The Lifted Veil: George Eliot’s Experiment with FirstPerson Narrative’, in Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750–2000, ed. by Sarah S. G. Frantz and Katharina Rennhak (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2010), pp. 101–18 (p. 105).
As Anne D. Wallace argues, ‘Through a narrator who aspires to be a Wordsworthian poet, a narrative which repeatedly calls attention to the failure of recollection in both life and art, and a structure which mimics the greater Romantic lyric but does not fulfil its expectations, The Lifted Veil runs explicitly counter to Wordsworthian poetics’. See Wallace, ‘“Vague Capricious Memories”: The Lifted Veil’s Challenge to Wordsworthian Poetics’, George Eliot — George Henry Lewes Newsletter, 18–19 (1991), pp. 31–45 (p. 31).
Of Eliot’s familiarity with German Romanticism, Newton writes: There is ample evidence in George Eliot’s letters and essays that she was well read in Romantic writing in English but what perhaps separates her from many of her contemporaries is that her knowledge of European Romantic writing was also extensive. The fact that she accompanied G. H. Lewes to Germany while he was researching his biography of Goethe was a particularly significant experience as this gave her first-hand contact with a German intellectual life that had its roots in Romanticism. See K. M. Newton, ‘Romanticism’, in Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, ed. by John Rignall (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), pp. 336–9 (p. 337).
John Keats, Lamia, II. 1. 237, in John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. by John Barnard, 3rd edn (London: Penguin, 1988).
For further background on Poetry and Prose from the Notebook of an Eccentric, see Essays of George Eliot, ed. by Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 13–14. References are taken from the version of Poetry and Prose in this edition and relevant page numbers will be given in the text.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery’, 11. 8, 36, in The Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994).
Hallam Tennyson, cited in Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. by Christopher Ricks (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), p. 515.
See James M. Decker, ‘Interpreting Latimer: Wordsworthian Martyr or Textual Alchemist?’, George Eliot — George Henry Lewes Newsletter, 20–21 (1992), pp. 58–62.
Byron’s Cain: A Mystery (1821) underscores Eliot’s later poem, ‘The Legend of Jubal’ (1870). Eliot’s eponymous hero, a shepherd who discovers the art of music along with the pains of mortality, leaves the fellowship of his community on a solitary pilgrimage. Martin Bidney argues that the ‘work ethic of Eliot/Jubal consorts oddly with the tragic, alienating quest of the Romantic solitary wanderer […]. “The Legend of Jubal,” we must conclude, is an ideologically conflicted work’. Bidney rightly identifies a ‘neo-Romantic’ strain in the poem, which encompasses Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron (with the Byronic hero channelled through Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’). But what is read as an incongruous intertextual backdrop can be seen as usefully indicative of Eliot’s treatment of Romanticism. Jubal may be the hero of the poem, but his brother, Tubal-Cain, emerges as a second protagonist with an equally striking Romantic provenance. The anti-heroes of ‘The Legend of Jubal’ serve to illustrate an advanced and revisionary Romanticism that pairs Tubal’s formidable autonomy and ambition with an energetic industry, and Jubal’s vision of inward enlightenment with an ‘external soul’ (p. 98). See Bidney, ‘“The Legend of Jubal” as Romanticism Refashioned: Struggles of a Spirit in George Eliot’s Musical Midrash’, George Eliot — George Henry Lewes Studies, 52–53 (2007), pp. 28–59 (pp. 29, 28).
William Blake, ‘The Clod & the Pebble’, 1. 12. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed. by Andrew Lincoln, Blake’s Illuminated Books (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP for The William Blake Trust, 1991), II.
K. M. Newton, ‘Byronic Egoism and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy’, Neophilologus, 57 (1973), pp. 388–400 (p. 393).
Richard Lansdown traces the genesis of the Byronic heroine from Dickens’s Edith Dombey and Lady Dedlock to Eliot’s Mrs Transome and Gwendolen Harleth. Lansdown sees The Corsair’s Gulnare as an important precursor to these Victorian heroines; Don Juan’s Lady Adeline Amundeville also ‘anticipates a great deal in Victorian fiction’. Richard Lansdown, ‘The Byronic Hero and the Victorian Heroine’, Critical Review, 41 (2001), pp. 105–16 (p. 107).
For a discussion of Armgart as a strong female hero, see Susan Brown, ‘Determined Heroines: George Eliot, Augusta Webster, and Closet Drama by Victorian Women’, Victorian Poetry, 33:1 (1995), pp. 89–109. Grace Kehler is concerned with the wider context of Armgart, reading the dramatic poem as an ‘inquiry into and lament for lost or suppressed voices’ in the history of music.
See Kehler, ‘Armgart’s Voice Problems’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 34 (2006), pp. 147–66 (p. 148).
See, also, Rebecca A. Pope, ‘The Diva Doesn’t Die: George Eliot’s Armgart’, Criticism, 32:4 (1990), pp. 469–83.
Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten, rpt (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), p. 322. Subsequent references will be given in the text. Eliot admired Brontë’s novel and, as Louise Hudd details, she attended a performance by Rachel. See Hudd, ‘The Politics of a Feminist Poetics: “Armgart” and George Eliot’s Critical Response to Aurora Leigh’, Essays and Studies, 49 (1996), pp. 62–83 (pp. 72–3).
Nancy Henry, The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), p. 87.
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Wootton, S. (2016). George Eliot’s Byronic Heroes I: Early Works and Poetry. In: Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57934-8_5
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