Eliot's Angels

George Eliot, René Girard, and Mimetic Desire

Bernadette Waterman Ward

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780268202644
• eBook ISBN: 9780268202637
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria inglese

René Girard's mimetic theory opens up ways to make sense of the tension between the progressive politics of George Eliot and the conservative moralism of her narratives.

In this innovative study, Bernadette Waterman Ward offers an original rereading of George Eliot's work through the lens of René Girard's theories of mimetic desire, violence, and the sacred. It is a fruitful mapping of a twentieth-century theorist onto a nineteenth-century novelist, revealing Eliot's understanding of imitative desire, rivalry, idol-making, and sacrificial victimization as critical elements of the social mechanism. While the unresolved tensions between Eliot's realism and her desire to believe in gradual social amelioration have often been studied, Ward is especially adept at articulating the details of such conflict in Eliot's early novels. In particular, Ward emphasizes the clash between the ruthless mechanisms of mimetic desire and the idea of progress, or, as Eliot stated, "growing good"; Eliot's Christian sympathy for sacrificial victims against her general rejection of Christianity; and her resort to "Nemesis" to evade the systemic injustice of the social sphere. The "angels" in the title are characters who appear to offer a humanist way forward in the absence of religious belief. They are represented, in Girardian terms, as figures who try to rise above the snares of the mimetic machine to imitate Christ's self-sacrifice but are finally rendered ineffectual. Very few studies have tackled Eliot's short fiction and narrative poetry. Eliot's Angels gives the short fiction its due, and it will appeal to scholars of mimetic and literary theory, Victorianists, and students of the novel.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Entranced by the lyricism and intensity of George Eliot’s Adam Bede the first time I read it, I found the character Dinah strangely weakened as she sought to convert Hetty, who was condemned for murder. I began to look back through the book for the meaning of this. George Eliot had been exquisitely rich in her descriptions of farm and dairy, country dance and kitchen work, carpentry shop and drawing room. Moreover, she had shown sharp, witty insight into the subtle ways people persuade themselves they are doing no harm, or neglect their duties, or miss saying the very thing or seeing the very thing that would join heart to heart. She had been so clear about dynamics in a family devastated by alcohol, so measured in her attention to detail in every least leaf, to every gesture that would enrich meaning, that I knew the lapse must be deliberate. And so it was. The narrator intruded with little flurries of explanation at key moments, as if there was something readers should fear about Dinah’s Methodism. Puzzled, I investigated early Methodism but soon realized that was not the source of the strange tension tugging at the story.

Meanwhile, my old friendship with René Girard was enlivening a sabbatical at Stanford University. As I joined his fortnightly salon, the patterns of behavior described in mimetic theory began to illuminate Eliot’s novels, and the relationships of the novels to the intellectual ferment in which they were written. I increasingly focused my presentations for the Colloquium on Violence and Religion on Eliot’s novels. Besides Girard himself, Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Gil Baillie, Paul Caringella, Randy Coleman-Riese, William Hurlbut, Mary Ann Eller, and Martin Ford were among the more helpful interlocutors.

A presentation on Daniel Deronda for the colloquium demanded attention to Eliot’s biography. The many studies of her life scarcely touched on the dissonances I had detected; mostly they joined a choir invisible, praising not only her wisdom about human relations and her skill at creating immersive settings but also her intellectual integrity, her progressive thought, her feminist boldness, and her courage in the face of convention. Her brother’s malice had been her great heartbreak; the loyal, loving hero who had awakened her talent and manifested her to the world was her longtime lover, George Henry Lewes.

Except for some of the incidents and locations described in her novels, the heroine of the biographies seemed scarcely connected to the voice of her fiction. There was a near-universal presumption in the criticism that humanism was the creed of any intelligent person and that Christianity was something that had been left behind—rather an embarrassment. This attitude was perhaps consonant with an argumentative strain in her novels, but it did not accurately reflect the conditions of their composition. These were not documents of triumph. Eliot had broken away from her cultural background with resentment and with anguish; the ambivalence pervades her novels. I first detected it in Adam Bede, but it was nowhere to be completely escaped; the colloquium alerted me to the mimetic dimensions of this cultural tension in itself. Then, in The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans, Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s attention to Eliot’s letters was revelatory. Her attention to family dynamics illuminated the novels; details about Eliot’s interaction with the Bray circle brought some of the intellectual turmoil into focus; the degree to which John Cross had controlled Eliot’s legacy amazed me.

I did not want to write a biography, and I have not done so. However, it was best to structure the book chronologically rather than thematically, in order to follow the author’s intellectual development. Only chapter 2 is thematically organized, showing how clearly Eliot noticed the patterns of behavior systematized by René Girard’s mimetic theory. Eliot’s fiction makes use of more biographical material than is conventionally invoked to discuss it. I was inspired by the groundbreaking work of Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Felicia Bonaparte, and Fionnuala Dillane. Reading the letters, fiction, journalism, and translation in temporal relation to one another revealed unexpected gaps in the treatment of her works. For instance, many critics follow John Cross in their intense focus on Eliot’s estrangement from her brother Isaac. His relations with her were, the letters show, far less harsh than biographers had implied; relations with her sisters, usually neglected by biographers, also strongly affect her work. Her journalism seems the work of a brash, self-confident partisan, almost at times a propagandist, easy to relate to the progressive and feminist icon. Yet her novels also endorse conservative stability with warmth and humanity. To add to the confusion, both Lewes and Cross described the novelist as emotionally sensitive, shrinking, even dependent and tentative. Sadness, self-consciousness, and resignation are deeply imbued in the letters. Something far more complicated than the inevitable progress of sensible, broad-minded humanism was going on there, and it deeply colored the novels.

Eliot’s translation work revealed a great deal. Most critics treat Eliot’s study of Baruch Spinoza, David Strauss, and Ludwig Feuerbach as her awakening to real scholarship among great minds. Spinoza alone seems to support that description. Eliot had rebelled against the conventional Anglicanism and the bigoted strain of Evangelicalism that she identified as Christianity. What she took away from Strauss and Feuerbach was less devotion to truth than examples of using scholarly apparatus in the service of an opposing ideology. Eliot was too keen and intellectually disciplined to fail to detect the dishonesty. She had been appalled by sincere but frightened biblical literalists; confronted with uncomfortable challenges, they had disgusted her by their intellectually flaccid, even cowardly attempts to save the appearances. Strauss and Feuerbach, and other progressive thinkers, were bolder. From them she expected scientific truth, but she found rather less sincere, though more competent, advocacy work. By the time she was translating their texts, she was already committed in various ways to the progressive movement around her. There was no place to go back to. Sensitive, idealistic, and rigorous in her moral perceptions, she bitterly experienced how scapegoating, exploitation, and cowardice reigned in Utopia also.

Important critics like George Levine and Gillian Beer, Barbara Hardy and F. R. Leavis, certainly take into account the thinkers that Eliot read, especially the ones she returns to repeatedly, such as Comte and Feuerbach. (Avrom Fleisschman has made a case for adding John Stuart Mill to her personal pantheon, but in the letters the support for Mill’s importance is weak.) Nevertheless, over and over, it seemed that some essential aspect of her attraction to these thinkers was passed over. Critics treated Eliot as if she pointedly chose her humanism and was pursuing it as a goal. What struck me in her novels was how little characters or plot seemed goal-oriented, focused on what was to be done. The stories primarily evoked sympathy, as readers found themselves thrown into lives thick with circumstance. The question seemed to be, rather, “How did this character end up in this place, as this sort of person?” Despite her solid and even stern moralism, Eliot’s fiction was not, as it were, so much about intention as about accident: efficient rather than final cause, to be Aristotelian. Her lush realism and piercing exploration of emotional mechanisms had, in the end, a weight of passivity, as if from a character far more like the dependent woman described by Cross and Lewes than the bold, self-possessed innovator that later critics described.

Could it be the case that such a searching intellect, in one who had moved so far outside convention, was indeed so dependent on some man’s aid and protection? Yet more uncomfortable was the impression, after much research, that the service Lewes rendered to her seemed rather less selfless than critics’ encomia indicated. He acted with her consent, often her grateful consent; but he did actively cut her off from her family, limit and channel her friendships, control her mail, and direct her professional life—not only financially, but even as to what topics and manuscripts she should work on. However encouraging and devoted he unquestionably was, it was also clear that his interests were not forgotten for the sake of hers.

Yet without a doubt, George Eliot always defended the integrity of her art. There she confronted issues that she did not venture to face in other venues. Her ability to imaginatively inhabit her characters exceeds that of any other nineteenth-century novelist in English. In her letters, she supported a determinism that she had been convinced to consider scientific, yet she impressed on readers the moral responsibility of individual characters even as circumstances entangled them. Firmly holding that a belief in absolute morality or metaphysical truth results in the “demon-worship” of persecution, she yet imagines and portrays passionate devotion to justice and abstract truth, even to God.¹ Her noblest creations often act from some foundational faith—one that she thoroughly inhabits, although she insists that she does not share it. Moreover, as she wrestles with her theoretical commitments, she also confronts her own compromises and disappointments, transposed into other keys. Unexpected characters and situations comment, with deliberate disguise, on the circumstances of her own crises. Her last collection of essays, although rarely read, ties together her novelistic powers with her experiential knowledge of imitation, prestige, competition, and scapegoating—with analysis revelatory about her thought and works.

The figure that I call the Mimetic Angel forms the nexus of these tensions among life experience, progressive ideology, and imaginative participation. The Angel is virtuous but self-defeating. She comes into being according to a recognizable pattern of thwarted imitation and competition. Despite Eliot’s earnest attempts to form a fully secular role model, the Angel loses rhetorical force when unseated from her religious foundations; other, more somber figures take center stage and enact the evils of mimesis.

Eliot’s work calls readers to confront, in their private lives and in their larger commitments, the tensions arising from envy and compromise—but also what she sees as the dangerously infinite yearning for joy. Her enduring insights diffusely and richly exemplify the patterns of human relationships that have been described in more systematic form by the mimetic theory of René Girard. Girard observes, “The great writers apprehend intuitively and concretely, through the medium of their art, the system in which they were first imprisoned together with their contemporaries. Literary interpretation . . . should formalize implicit or already half-explicit systems.”² Eliot’s fiction, despite her sectarian or partisan commitments, ended indeed by “giving a picture of life that endures.” Mimetic theory can illuminate how she does so.

CHAPTER 2

Mimesis and George Eliot’s Fiction

People imitate each other. Imitation is, fundamentally, a good thing. It is a transfer of meaning, the basis of all human relationship. Yet within mimesis lurks the peril of violence. Mimesis can manifest itself in surprising psychological and social ways; it saturates our politics, our religion, our economics, our sexuality, our ethics, and the innumerable means we use to influence one another. René Girard first began to understand the implications of mimesis when dealing with novels. Some specific aspects of his analysis have already been applied to the works of George Eliot in terms of triangular rivalry among characters, but a broader understanding of mimetic analysis can more fully illuminate the novels—and their relevance to the lives of readers.¹ Eliot has long mystified critics like Virginia Woolf by marrying morally impressive heroines to second-rate men; mimetic theory can uncover a rationale for this.² Without compromising the views that Eliot actually expressed about feminism, mimetic analysis explains how “submission becomes a weapon” in her novels.³ Girard rejoiced in being anticipated by Eliot;⁴ he claimed to be only systematizing what had long been observed by poets and prophets, ambassadors and advertisers, moralists and Machiavellians. Stories allow readers to critique the illusions that hold us captive and to enter sympathetically the world of others who are trapped in destructive imitation—sometimes as victims, sometimes as persecutors. George Eliot wrote in part because she held that the storytelling imagination liberates her readers from many temptations to hurt themselves and one another.

Like Girard, I unashamedly situate the writing of novels within the life and especially the intellectual history of the novelist; though I often disagree with Frederick Karl, I appreciate his insight that all the novels, even after The Mill on the Floss,⁵ process Eliot’s own life crises. As in her fiction she exposes the injustice and hopelessness of mimetic mechanisms and seeks to envision avenues of escape, George Eliot inevitably confronts tensions with her own social world and disquietude over her own life’s trajectory. Girard calls novelists “the true specialists in human relations,” and indeed Eliot’s insights reward readers’ attention.⁶ She has both a private and a public agenda; people write novels to say things to other people, and Eliot’s agile intellect allows her to address more than one audience at a time.

One of the principles of this study is that those who investigate mimesis cannot be free of it. This aphorism applies to Girard himself, of course, as he acknowledged in print,⁷ but also to Eliot, psychologically astute as she was. Even among people who see through the illusions of destructive mimesis, mimetic mechanisms generate fears. People resist understanding and revealing the distorted feelings and actions that spring from it. The vicious aspects of the system thrive on concealment. George Eliot well understands how mimetic mechanisms can be used protectively. Her novels constitute a noble endeavor, both because they reveal the patterns of destructive mimesis and because, as an artist, she resisted her own urgent motivations to protect herself socially and emotionally. She sometimes succumbed to such temptations in her life decisions; but she approached her art honestly rather than defensively. The writing of novels is as embedded in mimesis as their structure is. Novels at best are part of a common human endeavor in which readers and writers share. Mimetic analysis serves this communion in meaning.

There are two broad categories of mimetic analysis. One is primarily sociopolitical; the other is psychological and interpersonal. When Eliot’s novels touch on politics, crowd behavior, and social structures, her observations have much in common with social observation in all eras.⁸ This work naturally explores the novels’ insights about broad societal structures that develop from mimetic desire, insights of the sort that Girard later categorized. But it is for her moral insight into individual lives and her examination of character that George Eliot won her fame. Mimetic analysis is peculiarly helpful in uncovering the more complex psychological involutions of her characters, especially the development of the Mimetic Angel, a central figure in George Eliot’s fiction.

This character usually stands at the center of Eliot’s novels; she is most often a woman, who lives under some sort of oppression but demonstrates a compelling moral grandeur. She powerfully elevates the moral lives of those around her. Yet by the end of each novel, Eliot has curbed the Angel’s influence. Eliot has puzzled generations of readers by deliberately imposing mediocrity upon the Angel in her conclusions. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar call Eliot’s repeated figure the “Angel of Death.” They say she can “attain angelic submission only after considerable inward struggle against resentment and anger.”⁹ Their Angel is a figure of feminine self-hatred, indulging in “deflection of anger from the male she is justifiably shown to hate back against herself so that she punishes herself” (Gilbert and Gubar, 198). Such resentment is not actually characteristic of Eliot’s Angel figure; Dinah Morris, for instance, is utterly placid in her ascetic benificence. Moreover, twentieth-century feminist critics disregarded a larger pattern: several of Eliot’s Angel characters are male. The Mimetic Angel is not primarily a feminist image. In creating the Angel, Eliot grapples with a more general phenomenon of human moral consciousness.

Before I focus on this figure, it is useful to present some general exposition of Girard’s system of interrelating the observations he gleaned from literature and anthropology. Since I often refer to the ideas explained in the first section of this chapter, the technical terms from Girard’s mimetic theory are italicized the first time they are described. Thus these first pages may serve as a glossary for those unfamiliar with Girard’s work. For those familiar with mimetic theory, the chapter explains my perspective on and development of Girard’s ideas, which he rarely applies to women’s fiction or to English novels.

When John desires something because Mary likes it, Girard calls the impulse mimetic desire—originally triangular desire, because it requires three elements: first, John, the disciple; second, the object he wants; and third, Mary, the model (originally called mediator) who shows John the object to like. Though mimesis has survival value, Girard rarely considers mimetic desire in relation to basic necessities of life and safety. The fundamental appetite he considers in mimetic desire is neither physical nor social; it is spiritual, having to do with the inescapable restlessness of human yearning.

In social terms, mimesis makes for human solidarity. Humans come from the womb prepared to respond to each other.¹⁰ By imitation, people learn from each other and affirm the value of each other. If you like what I like, I know it’s worth liking. And if you don’t, maybe it’s not good for me. We teach one another constantly in this way. Think of eating an unfamiliar berry. If George eats and enjoys it, but Martha tastes it and makes a horrified face, George may reasonably doubt his own reaction. And Martha may be right. George could have eaten something poisonous. Our sensitivity to others’ opinions is helpful in many ways; we need each other’s information and encouragement. Moreover, Girard, like many thinkers before him, found in the capacity for sympathy the unified basis of human freedom and love.¹¹ If we could not transfer our desires, we would not be able to understand and pursue what pleases another person. Our desires would be fixed immutably on our own perceived needs. That ability—to perceive some other’s good as well as my own—is the root of freedom. No one can choose without a field of choices. Upon freedom depends human love; the ability to desire go...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Mimesis and George Eliot’s Fiction
• Chapter 3. Mimetic Anthropology: Eliot’s Early Years
• Chapter 4. The Intellectual Development of Mary Ann Evans
• Chapter 5. George Eliot’s Clerical Life
• Chapter 6. The Magic of Sympathy in Adam Bede
• Chapter 7. Hell in Other People: Mimesis and The Lifted Veil
• Chapter 8. Death and the River: The Mill on the Floss
• Chapter 9. The Interruptions: “Brother Jacob” and Silas Marner
• Chapter 10. Romola, Full-Fledged Mimetic Angel
• Chapter 11. Foiled Tragedy and Felix Holt
• Chapter 12. Myth and the Artist: The Spanish Gypsy, The Legend of Jubal, and Armgart
• Chapter 13. The Apocalyptic Angel of Middlemarch
• Chapter 14. Satanic Masquerade: Daniel Deronda
• Chapter 15. Mimesis in Theophrastus Such
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index