Abstraction and the Subject of Novel Reading: Drifting throughRomola

Abstract

Two compelling recent accounts of ctional characterization, perhaps unsurprisingly, take George Eliot as their exemplary case. In fact, in the work by Audrey Jaffe and Catherine Gallagher I'm referring to, Eliot's method of making characters is all about exemplarity itself. To be sure, Jaffe's The Affective Life of the Average Man and Gallagher's "George Eliot: Immanent Victorian" differ in many particulars, most profoundly about the issue of how Eliot asks us to feel about the typicality of her characters: Gallagher describes Eliot's project as "making us want. .. the quotidian" (73), while Jaffe argues that in Middlemarch "likeness anxiety takes on tragic proportions." But whether we conceive of typicality as a condition the novels recommend to us or as a nightmarish vision of undifferentiation the novels make us fear, it seems clear that Eliot's protagonists take their characteristic shape-their shape as characters-by oscillating between the conditions of radical individuality and radical generality. Jaffe and Gallagher both concentrate on Middlemarch, and it is worth noting that in that novel modern character measures itself not only against a vision of the general or the quotidian but also against a gold standard of epic plenitude. I'm referring to the presentation in the novel's prelude of Dorothea Brooke as a modern-and thus cruelly diminished and averaged out-version of Saint Theresa. This dynamic, whereby we come to know characters by the epic precedents they fail adequately to revive, is given its most overt delineation in Middlemarch, but it features elsewhere in Eliot's work. We might think of how Adam Bede's Dinah Morris is presented as "St. Catherine in a quaker dress" (64), of the Meyrick girls' fanciful likening of Daniel Deronda to Prince Camaralzaman (579), or of the comparison, offered by The Mill on the Floss's narrator, of Maggie Tulliver to Sappho (320). If to be a character in Eliot is to be a unit of measurement of a falling off from a recognized standard, these examples make clear that the relation of character to standard is often gured across a historical chasm. Character is not only a deviation from a norm but a distinctively modern derivation from a distant past. What is most striking to me is that these characters' relation to their precedents also comes to gure our relationship as readers to the characters. To be a character in Eliot-intelligently, exhaustively attended to-has its own grandeur, and one way to describe the work of the novels is as making these characters as thoroughly known, their lives as fully distinctive, as their historical or mythic models. If Middlemarch's prelude suggests that the heroine we will shortly meet is but one of a host of "many Theresas" (3), by the novel's closing sentences this famously anonymous young woman seems no longer a derivative but a new standard, so that we know exactly what our narrator means when she refers to the idea that contemporary reality is replete with "many Dorotheas" (838). Here, too, Middlemarch is exemplary of a much wider ...

George Eliot's Italian Roads: Mobility, Temporality and the Crises of Realism in Romola and Middlemarch

“…36 David Kurnick speaks of the novel's oscillation between a 'radical individuality and radical generality'. 37 Charactersespecially Savonarola but also Romolado not emerge organically from the background and Romola's proto-feminist, Victorian individualism and psychology jar with Savonarola's a-historical, ideational character despite his fundamental importance for her Bildung.…”

The Psychology of Reading and the Victorian Novel

“…Recent work on the reception of her novels has discussed the career‐long conflict between the controlling novelist with her realist convictions and her resistant readers who desired happy endings, which left its mark both within her novels and in how she published them 4 . David Kurnick has also described how, in Romola , Eliot portrays the condition of reading as a state of dreamy, but ultimately insightful, detachment. In this most researched of Eliot’s novels, “a novel that breathes an atmosphere of bookishness” (492), the heroine is marked by “drifting lassitude, an absence from her own unfolding story,” an “essential flakiness regarding the demands of her plot and her own characterological plausibility” (494).…”