George Eliot and Negative Form

MICHAEL EDWARDS

It is arguable that some of the essential things in George Eliot have yet to be explored. No doubt because criticism remains mostly in the limits set by Dr Leaviss strong and consistent account-its relative evaluation of the novels, its judgement as to what George Eliot does well and what she does badly, and above all its sense that the mode of her fiction is primarily moral, psychological and social. In a previous essay, on Adam Bede,l I tried to win what I thought proper attention for an early novel, and celebrated a neglected but perhaps highly significant character, Dinah Morris; and I offered a reading of the book, first as an opening-out towards a spiritual world beyond the natural (not merely as a dramatization of religious need), secondly as a meaningful shape, a single metaphor (the marriage of Adam and Dinah), and thirdly as a text profoundly poetic. I should like to continue by looking at a quite different, even opposite aspect of George Eliots work, the making of negative forms, and to concentrate again on one novel, Felix Holt.

It could be shown, I think, that there are several kinds of formal negativity in George Eliot, in books as various as The MiZZ on the Floss and Middlemarch. Felix Holt, though certainly a lesser achievement than these, is in its way more startling, extreme and modern. It also illuminates the question by failing to decide between two divergent forms, since from another perspective its construction is as positive as that of Adam Bede.

Schematically at least, its positive form even has a similar deep simplicity. One might describe the novel by saying that it recounts the fall of Mrs. Transome, her former lover Jermyn and their son Harold Transome, followed by the emergence into a new life of Felix Holt and Esther Lyon. It advances from youth to age to enduring youth; its rhythm is archaic, hinting of myth and romance.

Mrs. Transome and Jermyn have already fallen from youth and brightness (a recurring image) before the opening of the novel, having been aged internally by egoism. Several decades have con- verted the handsome, soft-eyed, slim young Jermyn (with a touch of sentiment) into a portly lawyer of sixty, for whom life had resolved itself into the means of keeping up his head among his professional brethren and maintaining an establishment, leaving him only the memory of those distant years when he and another bright-eyed person had seen no reason why they should not indulge their passion and their vanity, and determine for themselves how their lives should be made delightful (chapter 21). They fall further in the book, as does Harold, who belongs to their world and inherits their nature.

112 Critical Quarterly One sign of Harolds fall, his failure to be elected to Parliament,

occurs relatively early. The story then moves towards Felix and Esther, turning from a present which is merely an exhausted accumulation of the past to a present opened spaciously to the future. It concentrates on Felixs moral conversion of Esther, and her renunciation of wealth for the new life of which her early compunction concerning her father had been the beginning (ch. 13); and on Felixs own finding of a love to second his vocation.

Beyond them, Mr. Lyon, an Independent minister and Esthers step-father, stands as the guarantee of an entirely different old age, in which past time has been redeemed. In his self-forgetting zeal he has made the choice that the narrative anticipates for Esther- which gives unity to life, and makes the memory a temple where all relics and all votive offerings, all worship and all grateful joy, are an unbroken history sanctified by one religion (ch.44). His eyes are described as bright with . . . lasting youthfulness (ch.13).

Appropriately, the archaic pattern is founded, without emphasis, on natural generation and the seasons. An authorial comment links Esthers evolving to the evolving of vegetation: There was another day for her to think of [Felix] with unsatisfied resentment, mixed with some longings for a better understanding; and in our springtime every day has its hidden growths in the mind, as it has in the earth when the little folded blades are getting ready to pierce the ground (ch.18). The whole novel proceeds from a September to a May.

Like Adam Bede, the story is shaped by a single metaphor, in this case the succumbing of Mxs. Transome to Felix and Esther. It is also governed by a ternary sequence which I have suggested elsewhere to be the paradigm of tragedy.2 In outline, it progresses from youth to age to youth; from a radiant (though not heroic) well-being, through a fall, to the gaining of a greater good. The Introduction actually announces a tragedy, or signals at least that the Aristotelian emotions of pity and terror are appropriate to the Transome half of the narra- tive. The novel then tracks the Nemesis that finds the adulterous Mrs. Transome and Jermyn, and the destiny (ch.49) imposed on Harold by the acts of others. And to prevent the subsequent success of Felix and Esther from taking the work beyond tragedy-to hold the final accomplishment within the bounds of what I have called, in the same article, tragic optimism-there is the continuing and increased suffering of Mrs. Transome and of Harold. The conclusion likewise accompanies evidences of justice: Jermyns ruin, the fact that Lyon is happy in his child and Mrs. Transome unhappy in hers, by the prosperity of the base Johnson.

The triple, tragic measure of Felix Holt again recalls Adam Bede. Yet its effect is decidedly not tragic, except, perhaps, in Mrs. Tran- some. The third movement in particular lacks tragic reverberation, since Esthers sacrifice fails to be painful and Felix by the end is without power. Most significantly, there is an absence of relationship

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between the fall of the Transomes and Jermyn and the rise of Felix and Esther.

Indeed, by general agreement a great deal of the novel is humanly and formally deficient. The reason seems to lie precisely in the hiatus between its two worlds. Unity and conviction are impossible, since a negative and a positive impulse act against each other, the former disabling the latter.

One can begin to see this in the Introduction, which describes an imaginary coach ride (perhaps drawing on Scotts Heart of Mid- lothim) across the central plain of England. It contains much of George Eliots customary rich and easy celebration of the Midland scene, as in the Loamshire of Adam Bede. Abundance is again a characteristic, in clustered corn-ricks and full-uddered cows, and in hedgerows, the liberal homes of unmarketable beauty; and also oneness, in the slow and slouching walk of a shepherd, timed by the walk of grazing beasts. Again the scene is illuminated by humour, the shepherd who drives cows rather than sheep being followed by a sheepdog with a heedless unofficial air as of a beadle in undress.

In Adam Bede, Loamshire is contrasted with Stonyshire, the two metaphorical counties contributing potently to the tragic antithesis on which the novel is based. In Felix Holt, however, the plenitude is brusquely set aside, the language, in the same paragraph, transforming itself utterly: Such hedgerows were often as tall as the labourers cottages dotted along the lanes, or clustered into a small hamlet, their little dingy windows telling, like thick-filmed eyes, of nothing but the darkness within. Darkness, or blackness, recurs, and renders sinister even the big black mark that the impoverished inhabitants of such a hamlet, without reverence and indifferent, might make in the religious census.

A few pages on, in the first chapter, one is to realize that the dingy windows also prepare the initial description of Transome Court: Many of the windows had the shutters closed, and. . . the brown fir-needles of many years lay in a small stone balcony in front of two such darkened windows; and that the anthropomorphic simile: like thick-filmed eyes, insinuates the darkness within Mrs. Transome herself.

The Introduction resumes its earlier tone, the coach passes through trim cheerful villages, and there are even cottages with bright transparent windows, which one may later associate with Esther and Mr. Lyon. At the close, however, there is another sudden reversal. An even more abrupt and jarring paragraph dismisses the whole of the previous animated and basically sanguine discourse by an inrush of unprompted evocations of suffering and enigmatic hints as to the terrible course of the novel one is about to read. Significantly, it also directs attention not towards the title character but exclusively towards the negative, Transome side of the story.

At the same time, it throws a more urgent meaning into the, at

174 Critical Quarterly first sight, jocular use of Biblical resonance in the opening sentence of the book: Five-and-thirty years ago the glory had not yet departed from the old coach-roads. Behind this there is the momentous incident in the First Book of Samuel when the Israelites are defeated and the ark of the covenant seized by the Philistines. On hearing of the loss, the daughter-in-law of Eli gives birth to a son whom she calls Ichabod, the glory is departed. The unfolding novel reveals that the glory which has departed from George Eliots world is likewise far more than that of coach roads. The opening paragraph even notes, again lightly, that thirty-five years ago the stage coach itself was too modern for elderly gentlemen in pony chaises, nostalgic for the yet earlier pack-horses. It is as if the vision of glory recedes forever.

That sense of irreparable loss concentrates in Mrs. Transome. And doesnt her adultery also have about it a symbolic suggestive- ness? An act committed long before the beginning of the novel, it looms undeniably from the past, brings down a number of the characters and seems to weigh against the possible success of any of the novels undertakings. Without being a blatant Symbol, it is an original sin. The text itself prompts one to the perception. When, at Transome Court, Esther becomes gradually aware of Mrs. Transomes pain, the narrator comments: Even the flowers and the pure sunshine and the sweet waters of Paradise would have been spoiled for a young heart, if the bowered walks had been haunted by an Eve gone grey with bitter memories of an Adam who had complain- ed The woman . . . she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And many of us know how, even in our childhood, some blank discontented face on the background of our home has marred our summer mornings (ch.49). It is Paradise lost which constitutes, behind the fall of individual characters, the tragic misery of the book; and it is surely this belief that the world is fallen and (almost) beyond recovery which undermines the books positive movement-even in Mr. Lyon and Felix who have no dealings with Mrs. Transome- and accounts for its lack of conviction.

The whole of her side of the novel, moreover, sustains the meaning of Mrs. Transome. The narrative is patterned, as one knows, into two distinct areas, with Mrs. Transome, Harold, Jermyn and also Johnson in one, Mr. Lyon, Esther and Felix in the other. One notes also that the social division is reinforced ethically, at least among the main characters, the landowners and professionals representing egoism and compromise, the Independent minister and the watch- maker idealistic fervour. The naivety is only apparent, since the angle of vision is not social but figurative. The Transomes and their agents are above all possessors, persons implicated in the world, whereas Lyon and Nolt possess nothing and, in a sense, do not belong. The novel appears to use corrupted possessing classes as a metaphor for something like the way of the world.

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Consequently, Esthers flight from Mrs. Transome and from a fallen world serves to underline the negative action of the book. Her decision should clearly be the books dominant, positive action, and it does have some positive force considered in realist terms of psychology and morality : it climaxes her consciousness, under Felixs guidance, of painfully growing into the possession of higher powers (ch.22), which enable her to renounce a wealth accompanied by moral mediocrity. Nevertheless, the event is dramatically flat. She positively chooses a life of high principle rather less than she negatively rejects the significance of Transome Court and its Lady. Near acquaintance with her estate saddens and terrifies; her day- dream becomes a nightmare, Utopia (a word insisted on through repetition) narrows to the bitterness of Transonie Court, and in Mrs. Transome she sees herself. Observing the world, she acknow- ledges her illusions shattered, and refuses her inheritance.

One notices that the underlying fictive mode at work in Esthers choice is not realism, and that its larger significance is again figurative. (It draws another meaning into a situation taken almost completely from Silas Marner.) It also shows one of the ways in which the novels negativity operates. One might call this non-occurrence, an ironic voiding or avoiding of event. Despite the optimism of its archaic and tragic design, the whole bulk of the novel can be read as moving negatively. It is set in the aftermath of the Reform Bill of 1832, and conceins an election seen essentially from the side of the Radicals. Yet it ends in deliberate anticlimax-the Radical candidate is defeated-and well before this it counters any assump- tion of its being based on a measure of enthusiasm for radical politics by expressions of worried, massive disbelief in their efficacy. Felix Holt the Radical is a political novel only ironically. The pessimism is all the more telling when one recalls that it appeared in 1866, during the agitation for a second Reform Bill.

It is pervaded, indeed, by non-fulfilment. The Radical movement makes no advance, Harold fails to win a seat in Parliament, Felixs moral radicalism-which the writer does endorse-peters out politically, the new life of the Transome estate brings no satisfaction, Mrs. Transome doesnt have Esther for a daughter-in-law: and that seems to be the point. To fault the book because so little is achieved is to mistake its underlying meaning, and to apply a criterion of novelistic purposiveness which is, from this angle, inappropriate.

It sinks expectations; and it announces as much in the first chapter. Harolds homecoming, which is to be the long-awaited brightening of his mothers life-a spoiled shabby pleasure-day, in which the music and the processions are all missed, and nothing is left at evening but the weariness of striving after what has been failed of-turns out merely to increase her distress. This time the event does occur, but evacuated of its anticipated meaning. The single chapter states the whole novel.

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The negativity shows also through George Eliot inverting the canons of good composition, and voluntarily writing badly. Take Mrs. Transome again, who is often claimed to be superfiuous, irrelevant in particular to the novels poIitics. She does have rele- vance, in her fall with Jermyn and her suggestion of the world as lost; yet it remains true that she stands idle (Henry James) and hardly contributes to the plot. But that is precisely her pathos. One remembers her, not as an effective agent in a skilful story but as a deathly stillness, a sterile agitation.

Similarly with Lyon. Like Esther he is set against Mrs. Transome. Both are elderly, both have a child ignorant of his parentage, and both remember a distant love which they consider illicit, and which did lead Lyon into certain failings. The novel probes what is hidden in each of their pasts. They are, of course, distinguished utterly by their moral response to their love; yet Lyons repentance and dedication are of little more effect than Mrs. Transomes humiliation. He too stands idle, or nearly so. His small influence over others, the relative social failure of a character whom the author largely recommends, is an equally corrosive negative.

(Although Lyon is habitually dismissed in criticism, I am sure a case could be made that he is a major achievement-perfectly dramatized, thoroughly alive through his rich, artificial language, and above all inwardly understood, both in his moving and morally provocative individuality and against an amazingly sure social background of Evangelical attitudes and rhetorics. A comparison with Davie Dean, again in Heart of Midlothian, reinforces ones admiration. The case might begin by considering the very tender, vastly informed wit that goes to his creating; and it might conclude by urging that Lyon is quite as successful as Mrs. Transome.) In this perspective, one can also appreciate the complexity of

Esthers right of inheritance, which is under attack as involving the reader in a lot of unrewarded hard work, as being foreign to the political narrative, and as hanging the personal narrative on small print in the law of entail. Another view would be that it aggravates the portrayal of the baseness of the world. The novels attitude to the law (despite George Eliots legal friendships) is seemingly that of Felix as approved by Mr. Lyon: an averseness to a profession wherein a man may without shame seek to justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him (ch.38). The analysis of law may be superficial, but the presentation of the legal world as an expression of evil is compelling. The darkness of the law, the moral vulgarity of the men who prosper from it, and the sheer length of time spent with Johnson, Christian and Jermyn (germ ? vermin?) as they ravel their deliberately bewildering intrigues, impose the experience of a sinister, tangled wretchedness on which people and events may depend.

The clearest sign of both the kinds of negative I have been

George Eliot and Negative Form 177 discussing is the curious incident of the intended debate between Mr. Lyon and the Anglican curate, which has to be abandoned at the last moment when the curate flees in panic. The episode is of some length, and engages other characters than the prospective debaters. The failure of their confrontation to materialize would be ruinous in a well-made novel, leaving the tale as a weakly inconclusive digression. In this novel, however, which is in some ways very well made, according to one of the patterns of meaning it establishes for itself, the episode-which occurs in its dead centre -is perfectly controlled and vindicated: it isolates and projects the general movement of the narrative, from expectation to negation.

The work shifts, then, according to the angle from which one considers it. George Eliot herself seems uncertain as to quite what sort of novel she is composing. To suggest a negative reading there are also moments, as with the passage in the Introduction referred to earlier, when an Edenic wholeness is precipitately destroyed : Mrs. Transome stands one day, for instance, in a scene of natural bliss-the long shadows lay on the grass; the light seemed the more glorious because of the reddened and golden trees. The gardeners were busy at their pleasant work; the newly-turned soil gave out an agreeable fragrance . . . -only to learn, according to the final words of the paragraph, that the approaching step she hears is Mr. Jermyns (ch.8). To suggest a positive reading there are also the many powerful shafts of light in which George Eliots natural sympathy, with persons and places, continually asserts itself.

It is true that she attempts to reconcile the two ways of looking. The generalizing voice of the novel, commenting on Lyons illusion that he can influence Harold for good, absorbs individual failure into the rhythm of greater victory: what we call illusions are often. . . a wider vision of past and present realities-a willing movement of a mans soul with the larger sweep of the worlds forces-a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life (ch.16). This gains some support from the suggestion that Felixs passionate enthusiasm when trying to diffuse the election riot was of the sort which under other conditions, makes world- famous deeds (ch.33); and rather more from a similar heroic enlarging of Mr. Lyon : though his sensitive face had much beauty, his person altogether seemed so irrelevant to a fashionable view of things, that well-dressed ladies and gentlemen usually laughed at him, as they probably did at Mr. John Milton after the Restoration and ribbons had come in, and still more at that apostle, of weak bodily presence, who preached in the back streets of Ephesus and elsewhere, a new view of a new religion that hardly anybody believed in (ch.6).

Even so there is nothing in the book to reveal that larger sweep of the worlds forces, though Esthers conversion is presumably intended to do so, and the desired end seems anything but assured.

178 Critical Quarterly George Eliots uncertainty in her optimism shows in such things as Mr. Waces embarrassingly coy comment at Felix and Esthers wedding: I feel somehow as if I believed more in everything thats good. She is clearer with herself when acknowledging that she prevents her idealists from actually achieving ends, in this case through effective political action, by choosing Tories to cheer Felixs speech at the nomination-day (ch.30).

Her most intimate sense of things appears to express itself at certain moments when the narrative voice interrupts with a show of abrasive disillusion. This, for example, on Reform: Such a time [when faith in the efficacy of political change was at fever-heat in ardent Reformers] is a time of hope. Afterwards, when the corpses of those monsters [bloated paupers, bloated pluralists] have been held up to the public wonder and abhorrence, and yet wisdom and happiness do not follow, but rather a more abundant breeding of the foolish and unhappy, comes a time of doubt and despondency (ch.16). Or this, on Esthers puzzling over h4rs. Transomes hidden anxiety: young speculation is always stirred by discontent for which there is no obvious cause. When we are older, we take the uneasy eyes and the bitter lips more as a matter of course (ch. 40). Or this, after Lyon has wrestled against a desire for the young French woman he has sheltered in his house: The struggle of that night was an abridgment of all the struggles that came after. Quick souls have their intensest life in the first anticipatory sketch of what may or will be, and the pursuit of their wish is the pursuit of that paradisiac vision which only impelled them, and is left farther and farther behind, vanishing for ever even out of hope in the moment which is called success (ch. 6). It seems to be her inability to see the larger sweep-which she did see in Adam Bede and will try to recover in Daniel Deronda-and her despair at the loss of glory, of the paradisiac vision, that lead to the negative writing-out of the novel.

So the book works against itself. It fails to make persuasive its a w a t i o n of individual integrity in a fallen world, or, otherwise, to carry through its destructive intent. A melioristic vision jars against a pessimistic.

Its obscure underside is what could be of particular interest for us. It comes across as an accumulation of negatives. A readers disappointment at the form of the work should lead, therefore, not immediately to criticism of its authors control but to the discovery that, in this perspective, disappointment is part of its desired effect. The dissatisfaction it produces, in terms of the traditional norms that one expects to see observed, is a formal alienation designed to alienate one from the world as the work perceives it. The novel does not make but unmake; its form is ironic, not a construction but a falling-apart, a debris. It takes the assumed purposefulness of fiction, and of the reality that fiction was thought to imitate, and slowly undermines it; it invites the reader to re-enact a process of failure,

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to see that reality is incapable of teleological explanation and that life itself is written badly, to sense the world falling as the novel falls.

In this reading, Felix Holt moves away from the realist novel towards the modern novel. It begins an aggression on the genre, by subverting a number of its routines. And maybe it also suggests the arbitrariness of fiction. The readers malaise at the debate not taking place intimates, perhaps, what would have been the writers malaise if it had done so, or if Felixs type of radicalism had achieved political success. The books unconvinced, unconvincing ending may arise from a basic doubt as to what a story can prove, and why it should end one way rather than another.

For all its inadequacy, therefore, Felix Holt has special significance among George Eliots novels. Her writing shows, I believe, that what most deeply concerned her couldnt be worked out in terms of the realist novel, narrowly defined. Her fiction is consequently a series of vital experiments, of which Felix Holt is the most funda- mental: it collapses the genre itself, and even, with the abortive debate, thrusts a broken piece at the reader. It also prepares the negative form of Middlemarch.

A Reading of Adam Be&, in The Critical Quarterly of Autumn, 1972. *Racinian Tragedy in The Critical Quarterly of Winter, 1971.