Felix Holt’s Muddled Metaphors

Abstract

Readers usually consider Felix Holt one of George Eliot’s less successful novels, not so bad as Romola, but not nearly so good as Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, or Middlemarch. Its elitism, sentimentality, nostalgia, inconsistency, and excessive idealization of the main character usually take the blame for the inferiority. Elsewhere, I have argued that its confusing politics, a mixture of the Wollstonecraftianism of Mrs Transome’s plot and the Burkean gradualism of Felix’s, help account for the failure. But the conflict between expressed and implied attitudes toward metaphor, as indicated in various aspects of the intoxicant complex, also creates disturbing disjunctions. More obviously than the fiction, the companion ‘Address to Working Men by Felix Holt’ also loses effectiveness because its persona offers only metaphorical solutions to social problems. Felix the essayist falls into a practice he objects to as the youthful protagonist of the fictional work.