Always Sympathize! Surface Reading, Affect, and George Eliot's <em>Romola</em>

Abstract

I t is tempting to say that we need not speculate on the legacy of historicism because, to adapt a scene from Middlemarch (1871-72), our own methodological version of mr. Featherstone is still alive and well, his arm wrapped tightly around the safe box containing Victorian studies. If this intellectual miser feels himself a little worse for wear, he appears in no hurry to arrange his affairs. And yet, downstairs, his cousins, his grandchildren, and even his distant theoretical relations have gathered to show their concern, to see if the right word here and there might grant them the rights to his treasure. should these assiduous attentions unnerve the old man, or even hurry him to the land of defunct critique, so much the better. After all, he hasn't proven a very good steward of their interests.I am tempted to say that the petitioners might as well have stayed home, since, old as he is, New Historicism hardly seems ready either to give up the ghost or to loosen his grip on Victorian studies. However, the call for papers for this issue of Victorian Studies exhibited a new and disconcerting mental symptom in historicism's condition when it asked what discussions of surface and description "portend for Victorian historicism" AbstrAct: surface reading, the most prominent example of the recent backlash against the "hermeneutics of suspicion," eschews traditional depth-based approaches to literary and cultural analysis in favor of more descriptive reading practices. Despite the stridency of these assertions, however, when compared to traditional reading practices the published examples of surface reading demonstrate little methodological innovation. A discursive analysis of the emotional rhetoric mobilized by these arguments suggests that the real issue at stake has less to do with methodological dissatisfaction than with political disappointment. A reading of George eliot's Romola (1862-63) draws a parallel between romola's disillusionment with her spiritual and political mentor and surface reading's frustration with a previous generation of critics whose political promises remain unfulfilled. eliot's merciless dissection of both characters reminds us that, for her, sympathy was both an ethical mandate and a critical practice, a positive form of suspicion that reorients, rather than repudiates, accepted interpretive methodologies.

Religion Counts: Faithful Realism and Historical Representation in George Eliot’s Romola

“…Despite the ubiquity of religion in her novels, much literary criticism still freely chooses to ignore religious contexts and characters in her works (Knight 2019, pp. 16-21), opting instead to focus on secular humanist concepts like "sympathy" (Albrecht 2022;Ermarth 1985;Jewusiak 2014;Reilly 2013;Tegan 2013). This occlusion has a lot to do with the secular focus of the humanities today but can also be located in elements of Eliot's biography.…”