Abstract
The commentators on Felix Holt, the Radical have fallen for the most part into two groups, each more or less dissatisfied.1 There are those who, taking their cue from the title, expect the book to have a radical hero with effective political as well as personal quality, and the action to entail a modern political analysis of the structure of personality and society. Such readers are likely to conclude that Felix is an ineffective radical and ineffective hero, and that the action falls apart from that defective centre.
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Notes
I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Fellowship that allowed me to write this paper. Quotations are taken from Felix Holt, ed. Peter Coveney (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972).
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), 50–61.
Fred C. Thomson, ‘The Genesis of Felix Holt’, PMLA, 74 (1959), 576–84.
Arnold Kettle sees the initial symmetry of action between ‘the Transome area’ and ‘the Lyon-Holt area’, but considers that from about the twelfth chapter the novel deteriorates because it loses sight of the issue of Felix’s radicalism. He assumes that Felix is the protagonist. (Arnold Kettle, ‘Felix Holt, the Radical’, Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy [New York: Barnes & Noble; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970], pp. 99–115.)
David Carroll, who carries through to the end of the novel the parallels between Harold and Felix and sees Esther placed in the position of choosing between them, is still so far bound to the conventional reading that he finds Esther’s final choice of Felix an ‘anti-climax’ and considers that in the last third of the novel she has ‘usurped’ the ‘central position’ of the ‘titular hero’ and thrown the novel off balance! (David R. Carroll, ‘Felix Holt: Society as Protagonist’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 17 (1962), 237–52.
George Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. George R. Creeger [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970], pp. 124–40.)
Writing more recently, Laura Emory asserts the centrality of Esther’s role throughout the novel and the significance of her choice between Rufus Lyon and Mrs Transome as a parent, but Emory’s doggedly Freudian interpretation causes her to underestimate, in particular, the constructive role of Rufus Lyon. (Laura Comer Emory, George Eliot’s Creative Conflict: The Other Side of Silence [Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1976], 107 ff.)
A balanced view of the structure of the novel had been presented by Jerome Thale in The Novels of George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), and Peter Coveney in his Introduction to the Penguin edition has made a convincing case for the unity of Felix Holt in terms of Eliot’s poetic and political vision.
See, e.g. W. J. Harvey, The Art of George Eliot (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp. 131–4.
David Craig, ‘Fiction and the Rising Industrial Classes’, Essays in Criticism, 17 (1967), 64–75.
For an account of the assertion of ‘Gothic liberties’, see Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952).
V. S. Pritchett, The Living Novel (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), p. 90.
Fred C. Thomson, ‘Felix Holt and Classical Tragedy’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (1961), 47–58.
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© 1982 Gordon S. Haight and Rosemary T. VanArsdel
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Sandler, F. (1982). The Unity of Felix Holt. In: Haight, G.S., Van Arsdel, R.T. (eds) George Eliot. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05969-0_12
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