Decolonizing Victorian Anthropology (Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede)

Abstract

“Decolonizing Victorian Anthropology (Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede),” addresses the relationship between anthropology and the colonial project. Eliot was perhaps the Victorian novelist most informed about developments in anthropology and natural history, and her approach to a style of anthropological fiction, articulated in an early poetics of fiction, grew from this awareness. There is an element of anthropological self-fashioning in the early fiction, the interplay of outsiders and insiders mimicking the colonial encounter. The chapter considers the influence of Lewes’s natural history on Eliot’s deployment of the participant observer convention, and John Martyn’s autobiographical writings in the construction of the Rev. Tryan in “Janet’s Repentance.” In Adam Bede, Eliot’s pastoral realism refocuses on colonial Britain, and the novel is read here as a colonial allegory advocating a style of domestic colonialism.