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George Eliot and the Climate of Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William J. Hyde
William J. Hyde*
Affiliation:
Wisconsin State College, La Crosse
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Extract

Critics have attempted with diverse terminology and divergent points of emphasis to classify George Eliot's novels within the body of realistic fiction. She has been called a naturalist as well as a realist distinct from a naturalist; both her intent to depict the features of “the lowliest, … the least attractive person” and her inclination to shy away from “the animal” have been noted; she is cited as “the finest example extant of the thoroughgoing realism which came to be known as naturalism,” while attention is given, too, to her ability to exalt and idealize human nature and create morally uplifting examples of it in art. Undoubtedly the imprecision of our critical terminology accounts in part for the varying statements about her position. To this must be added the likelihood that critics are moved in various ways in their studies of the complex world that George Eliot describes and find in this world ample strands of evidence for whatever view they wish to emphasize. It is not the purpose at present to supply new and arbitrary definitions of “realism” and “naturalism,” nor to impose upon the reader a narrow unified view of George Eliot's work, but rather to examine the bearing of a broad and liberal trend of realism which can be observed to precede her rural novels in a body of critical discussion not often fully appreciated.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 1 , March 1957 , pp. 147 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

Note 1 in page 147 George Eliot as a naturalist, with certain basic distinctions from French naturalists, is discussed in Ferdinand Brunetière's Le Roman Naturaliste (Paris, 1896), pp. 209 ff. Lina Wright Berle, in George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, A Contrast (New York, 1917), pp. 168 169, distinguishes the “rational and sincere” attitude of the realistic George Eliot from the “exaggeration” and “falsification” of Hardy's naturalism. Robert Speaight, in George Eliot, Eng. Novelists Ser. (New York, 1954), pp. 65–66, and David Cecil, in Hardy the Novel ist (London, 1943), p. 42, simply find George Eliot more realistic than Hardy, whereas Anna T. Kitchel, like Miss Berle, discovers distinct naturalism in Hardy's Jude (“Scientific Influences in the Work of Emile Zola and George Eliot,” unpubl. diss., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1921, p. 167).

Note 2 in page 147 Cf. Ernest A. Baker, “George Eliot,” The History of the English Novel, viii (London, 1937), p. 230, with David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists (Indianapolis, 1935), p. 298.

Note 3 in page 147 Baker, VIII, 269; Floyd W. Casey, “George Eliot's Practice as a Novelist in Relation to Her Critical Theory” (unpubl. diss., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1951, pp. 164–165). The latter, however, refers (p. 250) to The Mill on the Floss as a naturalistic novel.

Note 4 in page 147 It must at once be conceded that the bearing of this realistic doctrine is well appreciated by Miss Alice Kaminsky in her recent article, “George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and the Novel” (PMLA, LXX, Dec. 1955, 997–1013), where she examines the “modified realism” of Lewes (p. 1001) and its marked influence on George Eliot's own formulation of critical theory. However, this useful focus on Lewes does not stress the more general devotion in the pages of the Westminster Rev. to a realism that was at times not very much modified. The Westminster Rev. is hereafter cited in footnotes as WR.

Note 5 in page 148 Gerald Bullett, George Eliot: Her Life and Books (London, 1947), pp. 54, 70, cites her 2-year span of editorship and 5-year span of writing reviews and essays. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman (New Haven, 1940), p. 86, lists her writing of the Belles Lettres sections (as well as other reviews) from July 1855 to Jan. 1857. In the appendices of The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, VII (New Haven, 1955), 358–383, the writings of George Eliot and Lewes for the WR are identified; authors of unsigned articles, which are indicated by “Uns.” in brackets in succeeding footnotes, are taken from this source.

Note 6 in page 148 A separate section was at first maintained by Chapman for contributors who did not advocate policies of the WR. See Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman, pp. 33, 44.

Note 7 in page 148 WR, LVII (Jan. 1852), 284; LVII (April 1852), 658; lviii (July 1852), 270; LXIV (Oct. 1855), 611; LXVI (Oct. 1856), 576.

Note 8 in page 149 [Uns.], “The Lady Novelists,” Lvm (July 1852), 135-136.

Note 9 in page 149 LXI (April 1854), 622; xxiv (July 1855), 290; LXVII (April 1857), 612-613; LXVIH (Oct. 1857), 595.

Note 10 in page 149 [Uns.], “Ruth and Vittelle,” LIX (April 1853), 486.

Note 11 in page 149 [Uns.], lxx (Oct. 1858), 488–518.

Note 12 in page 150 [Uns.], “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” LXVI (Oct. 1856), 458.

Note 13 in page 151 “The Progress of Fiction as an Art,” LX (Oct. 1853), 372-374; LXI (Jan. 1854), 305–308.

Note 14 in page 151 “Balzac and His Writings,” LX (July 1853), 199-214; LXVIII (Oct. 1857), 600–601.

Note 15 in page 152 Page 202 : “In ‘Gil Bias,‘ the fact of all the characters being knaves, with the exception of a select few who are fools, and the entire absence of sentiment and passion, render it, on the whole, an untrue picture of human life, in spite of the knowledge of mankind exhibited on almost every page.”

Note 16 in page 152 LXVI (Oct. 1856), 573.

Note 17 in page 152 LXVII (April 1857), 615; LXvii (Oct. 1857), 602.

Note 18 in page 153 [Uns.], “The Natural History of German Life,” LXVI (July 1856), 51–79. See Lionel Johnson, The Art of Thomas Hardy (London, 1923), p. 124.

Note 19 in page 153 LXII (Oct. 1854), 606.

Note 20 in page 154 “The Progress of Fiction as an Art,” p. 352. Cf. n. 15 above.

Note 21 in page 155 See Chs. x and xi. (All quotations from the novels are taken from The Writings of George Eliot, Warwickshire ed., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1907–08.) Lisbeth Bede, given the superstition of a peasant woman, attributes some form of consciousness to the corpse of her husband. Later she complains to Adam: “I'll ne'er rest i' my grave if I donna see thee i' the churchyard of a Sunday.” The same type of character, dominated by an inclination toward self-pity and nagging complaint, is later reflected with less humor in the portrait of the mother of Felix Holt.

Note 22 in page 155 Ch. xxxvii. Cf. the early scene in Hayslope before Dinah begins to preach (Ch. ii) : “Now and then there was a new arrival: perhaps a slouching labourer, who, having eaten his supper, came out to look at the unusual scene with a slow bovine gaze.”

Note 23 in page 156 In “The Natural History of German Life” (p. 56), George Eliot observes: “In England, at present, when we speak of the peasantry, we mean scarcely more than the class of farm-servants and farm-labourers.” While she further allows that tenant farmers and small proprietors had more resemblance to the peasantry “half a century ago,” she is never likely to confuse the Poysers and their friends with the class of people employed by them. C. W. Meadowcroft, Jr., in The Place of Eden Phillpotls in English Peasant Drama (Philadelphia, 1924), p. 10, is one of the few critics to mention that “George Eliot's pictures of humble village life, in spite of her pronouncements [in ‘The Natural History of German Life‘] are not of the agricultural laborer proper.”

Note 24 in page 156 H. C. Minchin, “George Eliot: Some Characteristics,” Fortnightly Rev., cxii (1919), 899.

Note 25 in page 156 Tommy Trounsem, in Felix Bolt, who is tricked into putting up Conservative posters while in the pay of the Radicals, is another low comic character, one with little intelligence but with a touch of pathos; yet he is far more important as an unconscious mechanism in the plot than as a person.

Note 26 in page 157 Thomas Hardy, “The Dorsetshire Labourer,” in Life and Art, ed. Ernest Brennecke, Jr. (New York, 1925), pp. 22–23. (This passage in defense of Hodge is repeated almost verbatim in Tess, Ch. xviii.) On realism, see his “The Science of Fiction,” pp. 87 ff.: “realism, that is, … an artificiality distilled from the fruits of closest observation”; also, “The Profitable Reading of Fiction,” pp. 72–73: “the characters, however they may differ, express mainly the author, his largeness of heart or otherwise, his culture, his insight, and very little of any other living person, except in such an inferior kind of procedure as might occasionally be applied to dialogue, and would take the narrative out of the category of fiction: i.e., verbatim reporting without selective judgment.” Hardy observes the peasant closely and intimately but always draws him with the exercise of an artist's selectivity. For some discussions of the measure of unreality in Hardy's peasant characters, see Cecil, Hardy the Novelist, p. 92; H. C. Duffin, Thomas Hardy, Eng. Ser., No. 8 (Univ. of Manchester, 1916), pp. 22–23; H. B. Grimsditch, Character and Environment in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London, 1925), pp. 63–64, 74; or Donald Davidson, “The Traditional Basis of Thomas Hardy's Fiction,” Southern Rev., vi (1940), 162–178.

Note 27 in page 159 “The Lady Novelists,” p. 135; WR, LVII (April 1852), 658 (review of Horace Grantham). 28 LVII (April 1852), 656–657 (review of The Heir of Ardrennan).

Note 29 in page 160 The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, Ch. v; The Mill on the Floss, Bk. iv, Ch. i; Middlemarch, Ch. xxiv. 30 See George Eliot, “The Influence of Rationalism,” Fortnightly Rev., i (1865), 43.

Note 31 in page 161 “Realism in Art,” p. 494: “Is [the true idealist] not more real than a Teniers, who, admirable in externals, had little or no sympathy with the internal life, which, however, is as real as the other?”

Note 32 in page 161 Le Roman Naturaliste, pp. 213 ff.

Note 33 in page 162 “The Progress of Fiction as an Art,” p. 358.

Note 34 in page 162 The broad scope of George Eliot's sympathy can already be seen in Janet's Repentance, Ch. vii, where Mr. Dempster, “the orator of the Red Lion, and the drunken tyrant of a dreary midnight home,” is pictured as “the first-born darling son of a fair little mother.” In Ch. x of the same work she considers the sympathy necessary for the treatment of that inward reality that Lewes had described: “Yet surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him—which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion. Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and work the life and death struggles of separate human beings.”

Note 35 in page 162 For a naturalistic ending comparable to Zola's, notice the final scene of the flooded cotton pickers in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Such use of the “slice of life” technique is, of course, not to be expected of English novelists in George Eliot's time. From the standpoint of Harold Transome, Felix Holt does conclude on a note of unresolved anguish and despair. Nevertheless, Transome has been hinted unworthy throughout, and his final suffering provides the solution, the penalty, for his inherited web of sin. Were the final penalty to fall rather upon Felix, George Eliot would have to face a situation outside the bounds of her moral patterning of life. A historian of the period will sense Felix Holt's reprieve as untypical of the life of his class.

Note 36 in page 163 For a discussion of George Eliot's growing tendency to moralize explicitly in her later novels, see M. Parlett, “The Influence of Contemporary Criticism on George Eliot,” SP, xxx (Jan. 1933), 105 ff.

Note 37 in page 163 See J. S. Diekhoff, “The Happy Ending in Adam Bede,” ELS, in (1936), 221–227. Diekhoff argues that in writing the “happy ending,” George Eliot, at Lewes's instigation, not only spoiled the consistency of the characters of Adam and Dinah but abandoned her own central moral thesis that a widespread and inevitable unhappiness must follow in the wake of sin. But may it not be a counterpart of the same moral thesis that imposes a reward upon Adam and Dinah? And while it is true that Hetty is not hanged and Donni-thorne eventually returns to his estate, no character attains unalloyed happiness. After the web of circumstances has been unraveled and punishment dealt, the characters enter upon a new world where all is changed by the permanent scars of suffering.

Note 38 in page 163 See Joan Bennett, George Eliot: Her Mind and Her Art (Cambridge, Eng., 1948), p. 93: “But one suspects that the scene [of Milly's death] is literary rather than naturalistic.”