George Eliot and the Gothic Novel

Genres, Gender and Feeling

Royce Mahawatte

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780708325766
• eBook ISBN: 9781783160334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Royce Mahawatte critically compares the frightening, startling and melodramatic moments in George Eliot's fiction with excerpts from Gothic and sensation novels and in doing so argues that suspenseful plotting, and Gothic figures and tropes, play a role within Eliot's ambitions for the Victorian novel.

Part I

Reimagining the Genres of Feeling

1

‘as if there was a demon in me’:1 ‘Janet’s Repentance’ and the Evangelical Gothic

Possibly the earliest literary connection between George Eliot’s creative work and the Gothic mode lies, not with the author’s creative relationship with the ‘classic’ Gothic or even with the emerging sensation novel, but instead with affective regimes of religious fiction. Eliot’s third published story was an Evangelical narrative adapted to suit an ethics of sympathy and affect. ‘Janet’s Repentance’, first serialized in Blackwood’s in June 1857, told of a woman succumbing to alcoholism under the pressure of domestic violence. After the narratorial rejection of the high-impact approach to storytelling found in ‘The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton’, the third fiction in the short-story triptych Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) reverses this intention to a degree. It is a tale of religious conversion and retribution, and it utilized and adapted many of the affective strategies and startling effects found in Gothic writing. In fact, the tale becomes increasingly gothicized as it reaches its climax. The narrative of Janet Dempster and her violent husband is shaped by passionate confessions and the depiction of a fallen woman redeemed. The narrative uses Gothic lexis and it is finally resolved by a violent deathbed scene. This chapter will present the ‘Evangelical Gothic’ as an early exponent of the Gothic abstraction. Evangelical fiction often presented a gothicized reality − extreme behaviour, violence, criminality, fear, bodily affliction, sexual excess and restraint, visions of hell and ultimately a conservative social order. It is important to establish this modality because Eliot appears to be creatively drawn to the narrative opportunities and ethical implications of the Evangelical Gothic throughout her fiction-writing career.

By the 1850s, George Eliot had rejected Christianity, but her need for a sense of order and retribution gave shape to her writing and allowed an eclectic mixture of philosophies and literary forms to come together in her work.2 While her intellectual development has been well documented, Eliot’s engagement with popular religious narrative has barely been explored. Evangelical fiction, with its moral tone and its representation of heightened feeling offered a model that linked psychology to the turns of fortune, and as a result, had bearings on the representation of Christian life. Eliot, with her own evangelical Anglican past and humanist beliefs, adapted the form to show that sympathy and community could be connected in a literary way that presented a semi-secular providence without explicit sermonizing.3 This chapter will present the Evangelical Gothic via the exploration of examples of Christian literature alongside Eliot’s engagement with it, which eventually produced ‘Janet’s Repentance’. The expression of Eliot’s moral philosophy was helped by the most striking use of melodramatic techniques and Gothic images which compare significantly with the work of religious fiction writers such as Hannah More and also Caroline Lucy Scott, whose Evangelical novel Eliot reviewed unfavourably two years before the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life.

‘brought to love and fear thee, through Jesus Christ’:4 religious fiction and strategies of affect

Evangelical narratives ranged from the religious tract to the novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These clerical stories that told of Christian conversion and the subsequent improvement of character rose to prominence with the religious changes that took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period which saw the proliferation of religious dissent and sectarianism in England. Religious fiction appealed to a range of classes and it also appeared in dissenting and High Church forms. Subsequently it was highly popular and promoted the importance of the emotions as a part of Christian experience rather than the virtues of reason, and, according to Pickering, it created the conditions for not only sentimental novels, but also serialized fiction and the moral voice of Walter Scott.5 Hannah More (1745−1833), playwright and patron of the Sunday School Movement, published Cheap Repository Tracts (1795−8) about working-class lives, and her influential novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife, Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals (1809) ran to eleven editions in nine months. Mary Martha Sherwood (1775−1851) wrote on the middle classes and her tales of family life were a potent mixture of tenderness and terrifying psychological discipline. Perhaps, most notable in the mid-Victorian period, was the prolific High Church fiction of Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823−1901).

Evangelical fictions were persuasive and polemical. They sought to bring readers to good works, an awareness of the afterlife, and to deter them from criminality and disorderly behaviour. Conversions played an important part, as did retributive sequences of gruesome torment and death. These works also had a domestic frankness which allowed the free expression of emotion, often sentimental but also negative, egotistical and violent ones. They also depicted criminal behaviour, a feature that could also place this genre as a precursor of the Newgate and sensation novel. Illegal ways of procuring money, dishonest business practice, theft, domestic violence, alcoholism and veiled sexual impropriety were stock elements of Evangelical fiction.

Hannah More’s The History of Hester Wilmot is a domestic conversion narrative set in an abusive household that demonstrates the different kinds of extreme affect, fear followed by sentiment, so important to the genre. The tract tells of a family where John, the father, is an alcoholic, and Rebecca, the mother, is too worldly and aggressive. The pious daughter, Hester, gives John money that she would have used to buy a new dress for church and is scolded by her mother for ‘having brought such a disgrace on the family as to be seen in that old rag of a gown’. When Hester is forced to confess that she had given the money to her father, Rebecca:

divided her fury between her guilty husband and her innocent child, till from words she fell to blows. John defended his daughter, and received some of the strokes intended for the poor girl … At length the poor girl escaped up stairs, not a little bruised, and a scene of much violence passed between John and Rebecca.6

Although the narrator uses understatement to describe events, at no point does it try to shield the reader from the violence of the situation. Hester’s body is ‘not a little bruised’ and she manages to ‘escape’ upstairs. There is a Realist depiction of family dysfunction which is combined with sentiment and sympathy intended to make an impact on the reader.

The conversion scene which follows illustrates the blend of melodrama and religious message. John goes upstairs to visit his daughter:

He stopped at the door, for, by the light of the moon, he saw her kneeling by her bedside, and praying so earnestly that she could not hear him. As he made sure she could be praying for nothing but his death, what was his surprise to hear these words, ‘O Lord, have mercy upon my dear father and mother: teach me to love them, to pray for them, and do them good; make me more dutiful, and more patient, that, adorning the doctrine of God my Saviour, I may recommend his holy religion, and my dear parents may be brought to love and fear thee, through Jesus Christ.’

Poor John, who would never have been hard-hearted if he had not been a drunkard, could not stand this; he fell down on his knees, embraced his child, and begged her to teach him how to pray. He prayed himself as well as he could, and though he did not know what words to use, yet his heart was melted; he owned he was a sinner, and he begged Hester to fetch the prayer-book, and read over the confession with which he had been so struck at church.7

Faith and conversion are communicated through religious registers and depicted via tableau-style representations: the moonlight scene of the daughter praying and the father falling onto his knees and confessing. Father and daughter are transformed by a union of religious feeling. Within this union fear has a dual resonance. Hester’s family life is unstable and violent, yet fear is recast through her prayer as religious humility (‘that he may be brought to love and fear thee’) when the divine is considered. There is an exchange of physical fear for the kind that is associated with sublime experience.

The figure of the daughter as a Puritan heroine is significant here. Hester forgoes the purchase of a dress owing to her father’s poor money management, and her subsequent religious devotion brings him to conversion. The figure of the self-denying and exemplary heroine whose femininity is shaped by Christian ethics and psychological introspection acts in this tract as an interface between the reader, the secondary characters and the religious polemic of the narrative. The Puritan heroine has an affinity with religious feeling, a spiritual dimensionality that makes her other-worldly. This figure has a particular bearing on Eliot’s depiction of femininity starting with Janet Dempster.

The deathbed scene often took place in prisons or in public houses, where the reader could witness the end result of a life of criminality or debauchery. Hannah More’s The Two Shoemakers, a six-part tract serial, tells the story of two apprentices, the diligent James Stock and the wastrel Jack Brown. After a life of drink and carelessness their master lies dying in a public house. James visits his drunken master:

What was the dismay of James, when he saw his miserable master stretched out on the settle, in all the agonies of death! He had fallen into a fit, after having drunk hard the best part of the night, and seemed to have but a few minutes to live. In his frightful countenance was displayed the dreadful picture of sin and death; for he struggled at once under the guilt of intoxication, and the pangs of a dying man … James went up to him, took him by his cold hand, but was too much moved to speak …

‘Oh! James, James,’ cried he in a broken voice, ‘pray for me, comfort me … Death is dreadful to the wicked — Oh the sting of death to a guilty conscience!’ Here he lifted up his ghastly eyes in speechless horror, grasped hard at the hand of James, gave a deep hollow groan, and closed his eyes, never to open them but in an awful eternity.

This was death in all its horrors!8

In this sequence the choreography of the emotions illustrates retributive justice. Emotional intensity, fear, horror and pathos form a tableau that is characteristic of Evangelical fiction. The descriptions of physical features in agony; James’s inability to speak, the final pleading and the last-minute grasping of the observer’s hand convey an awareness of retribution via melodrama.9 These sequences are clearly melodramatic in their construction: they place emotional realism above the requirements of plausibility and naturalistic speech. A wasted life is manifested on the surface of the body and at the same time it is visualized in the mind. Justice in this tract is gothicized – Jack’s death ‘in all its horrors’ seeks to convince the reader that a life of vice will lead to hell. By the 1860s this collision of popular genres would often stay with reviewers who, now armed with a critical vocabulary for the genres of feeling, would find themselves commenting not only on the moral regimes of religious fiction, but also on the genre’s imaginative opposite, which seemed not so far away. A review of Charlotte Yonge’s The Young Stepmother (1861) in the Sixpenny Magazine opened with: ‘No fear of unwholesome excitement in these pages. It is the reverse of a sensation novel. Yet it is assuredly more lively than a sermon.’ Then the review goes on to describe a sub-plot where one of the daughters in the narrative ‘changes from good to evil with at least equal rapidity, and with a much more dangerous impulsiveness’ and adds that ‘Considerable exaggeration is evident in describing the religious feeling of this somewhat tiresome young lady … her fits of sullenness and repentance seem to recur with increased violence …’10 So even though the novel is not identified as a sensation novel, the critical discourse around it still presents the nature of the representation as if it were not far off from one.

While a structural analogy with Gothic forms existed, there was also a telling difference. The religious tract redefined the salacious and spectatorial nature of the genres of feeling. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s comment about The Monk in 1797 (that a writer who uses ‘situations of torment and images of naked horror’ is on a par with ‘him who should drag us by way of sport through a military hospital’) could hardly be aimed at More or Yonge because of the status that their work occupied.11 Tract fiction was not literature but the representation of higher truths, of conversion, introspection and retribution. Of course, and at least at face value, the interest in domestic conflict, religious conversion and horrific deaths, was not salacious. Such events were cautionary. The underlying premise was that Evangelical fiction was not fiction at all but edification and that the techniques of melodrama, the commitment to representing emotion in stylized ways were devices necessary for the saving of souls. Evangelical fiction was connected to the Romantic emphasis on individual experience. It would be inappropriate to the argument to develop any sense of ridiculousness here or Baudrillard’s sense of fakery, even if it is apparent to the modern or erudite reader. Though they certainly crop up in places, irony and humour do seem out of place in the overall strategies of Evangelical writing. In fact, relentless sincerity in the form of spectral conscience, which is both familiar and arresting, seems to be the prominent impulse. This was a sensation that George Eliot adopted in ‘Janet’s Repentance’.

‘some phantom conjured up by fancy’:12 George Eliot and Christian fiction

In the period 1838−40, Marian Evan wrote letters to Maria Lewis, the tutor at Nuneaton School who introduced her to Evangelical Christianity, that contain passionate analysis of her reading. During Eliot’s religious period most of her reading was Evangelical. In addition to the theological commentaries and lectures of the Latitudinarian, Archbishop Leighton, Evans also read biographies of the controversial Methodist, Sir Richard Hill and aslo Hannah More.13 Her correspondence with Maria Lewis is richly passionate. On religious novels, at age twenty, she wrote:

It is the merit of fictions to come within the orbit of probability; if unnatural they would no longer please. If it be said that the mind must have relaxation, ‘Truth is strange — stranger than fiction.’ When a person has exhausted the wonders of truth, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Names
• Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Prologue
• Introduction: ‘half-womanish, half-ghostly’: George Eliot and the Inheritance of the Gothic
• Part I: Reimagining the Genres of Feeling
• Part II: Uncanny Women, Fearing Men
• Epilogue: ‘sufficiently in the track of ordinary probability’
• Notes
• Works Cited and Consulted