The Ethical Vision of George Eliot

Communion and Difference

Thomas Albrecht

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000029260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The Ethical Vision of George Eliot is one of the first monographs devoted entirely to the ethical thought of George Eliot, a profoundly significant, influential figure not only in nineteenth-century English and European literature, nineteenth-century women's writing, the history of the novel, and Victorian intellectual culture, but also in the field of literary ethics. Ethics are a predominant theme in Eliot's fictional and non-fictional writings. Her ethical insights and ideas are a defining element of her greatness as an artist and novelist.

Through meticulous close readings of Eliot's fiction, essays, and letters, The Ethical Vision of George Eliot presents an original, complex definition of her ethical vision as she developed it over the course of her career. It examines major novels like Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda; many of Eliot's most significant essays; and devotes two entire chapters to Eliot's final book Impressions of Theophrastus Such, an idiosyncratic collection of character sketches that Eliot scholars have heretofore generally overlooked or ignored.

The Ethical Vision of George Eliot demonstrates that Eliot defined her ethical vision alternately in terms of revealing and strengthening a fundamental human communion that links us to other persons, however different and remote from ourselves; and in terms of recognizing and respecting the otherness of other persons, and of the universe more generally, from ourselves. Over the course of her career, Eliot increasingly transitions from the former towards the latter imperative, but she also considerably complicates her conception of otherness, and of what it means to be ethically responsible to it.

1 The Defective Mirror

The Ethics of Realism in Adam Bede and “The Natural History of German Life”

I. Mimesis as a Moral Imperative

“Foh!” says my idealistic friend, “what vulgar details! What good is there in taking all these pains to give an exact likeness of old women and clowns?” (Adam Bede, chapter 17)

What good indeed is there in giving painstakingly exact likenesses of old women and clowns? This is as much as anything else the moral question with which Eliot’s early fiction, the three stories collected in Scenes of Clerical Life and her first novel Adam Bede, and many of her review essays from the 1850s concern themselves. In one of those essays, an 1856 review of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Volume III (1856) published in the Westminster Review, Eliot directly addresses the relationship between realism and ethics:

The truth of infinite value that [Ruskin] teaches is realism – the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality. The thorough acceptance of this doctrine would remould our life; and he who teaches its application to any one department of human activity with such power as Mr. Ruskin’s, is a prophet for his generation. (SE 368)

Ruskin’s doctrine, as Eliot describes it here, is not only artistic but explicitly ethical: a truth of infinite value, a doctrine that would remold our life, a prophecy (the latter metaphor she borrows from Ruskin himself).¹ In her review of Ruskin’s book, Eliot does not elaborate on just how the doctrine of realism would have this effect, how in her view its acceptance would reshape and enrich our individual and collective lives. But she takes up this topic in two texts that are contemporary to the Ruskin review: the 1856 review essay “The Natural History of German Life” and chapter 17 of Adam Bede, composed in 1857–8 and published in early 1859. Both are frequent references in critical discussions of Eliot’s conception of realism and specifically of her conception of realism as an ethical mode.

“The Natural History of German Life,” published in the Westminster Review three months after the article on Ruskin, is primarily a review of two ethnographic studies by the German social theorist and cultural historian Wilhelm Riehl. But its opening pages are devoted to correcting an artistic fallacy Eliot finds endemic in English literature and visual art: the misrepresentation of the rural working class in the form of sentimental clichés, such as the commonplace associations of peasants with mirth and jocundity, rosiness and plumpness, and simplicity and honesty. Eliot argues that these misrepresentations are due to the insidious influence of what she calls idyllic literature and art, and that they might be countered by the writer’s or artist’s meticulous and objective observations of actual working-class people. She frames this fallacy not only in artistic but in distinctly ethical terms: “our social novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of their representations is a grave evil” (E 270).²

Chapter 17 of Adam Bede, “In Which the Story Pauses a Little,” takes up much the same argument. In the chapter, Eliot’s male narrator momentarily interrupts his account of the story and reflects on the act of storytelling in which he is engaged.³ Taking as his point of departure an imagined objection by one of his readers to his depiction of a minister who shows empathy for another character’s illicit romantic and sexual feelings, he explains that his aim is to represent social life and human characters accurately, rather than to idealize or improve upon them: “I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity” (194–95). And as Eliot in “The Natural History of German Life” identifies idyllic misrepresentations of the rural working class as an evil, the narrator here conversely identifies his “faithful representing of commonplace things” (196–97) as a moral imperative. He says that he will tell his story “as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath” (193) and concludes his argument, “I herewith discharge my conscience” (201).

In “The Natural History of German Life,” Eliot defines the connection between ethics and the “faithful representing of commonplace things” in terms of the moral effect such representations will have on a reader (or, in the case of visual art, on a viewer). She envisions this effect as an “extension” of the reader’s or viewer’s empathies—the actual word she uses is sympathies⁴—for other human beings, including persons whose emotions and circumstances are different and remote from one’s own:

our social novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of their representations is a grave evil. The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. When [an artist gives such a picture of human life] more is done towards linking the higher classes with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. (E 270–71)

This passage draws a distinction between “our social novels,” by which Eliot means the kind of idyllic literature she has been critiquing in her essay, and what she calls “art,” by which she means realism in the sense she attributes to Ruskin in her review of Modern Painters, Volume III. If the danger of idyllic literature (and idyllic art more generally) lies in its misrepresentation of human life, the benefit of realism lies in its correspondence to life (“Art is the nearest thing to life”). Eliot’s argument, while not fully spelled out, seems to be that realism gives its reader a true image of “our fellow-men,” including presumably characters whose social and emotional circumstances are various and different from the reader’s or viewer’s own. The effect of this contact is to extend the reader’s or viewer’s consciousness, to amplify her experience of humankind, and ultimately to generate empathy in her, first for the characters and figures she encounters in literature and art, and then also by extension for actual other persons in the world.⁵ Eliot claims that realism’s power to generate empathy in a reader or viewer is unique and unprecedented. For her, this power is what privileges art over other forms of ethics, such as “sermons and philosophical dissertations” and “Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics” (by which she means political theory, Kantian and other rule-based moral philosophies, utilitarianism, and social science, among other things), which all “require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity” to be morally effective.

Eliot finds the idea of human beings having the capacity to feel empathy for other human beings in Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity: “[Man] can put himself in the place of another, for this reason, that to him his species, his essential nature, and not merely his individuality, is an object of thought” (2). In the passage from “The Natural History of German Life,” she defines the moral effect of realist art on readers and viewers, what she calls the “extension of our sympathies,” in terms of the communion imperative, the imperative to connect with other human beings, however different from oneself, via an intuition of a common humanity, an intuition of what Feuerbach calls species or “essential nature.” She describes this effect as an “attention” to others, a “linking the higher classes with the lower,” an “obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness,” and an “extending our contact with our fellow-men.” For Eliot, the moral contact between a reader or viewer and her fellow human beings, made possible by her exposure to realist representations, can manifest itself in various ways. As suggested by the phrases “obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness” and “linking the higher classes with the lower,” one way it may manifest itself is as a bridging of class differences and a transcendence of class distinctions in a viewer’s or reader’s morally expanded consciousness. As we saw in the previous chapter, in “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” (published six months after “The Natural History”) Eliot’s narrator similarly posits a link, founded on the recognition of a shared humanity, between the story’s implied urban, educated reader and its provincial, rustic characters.⁶

If Eliot in “The Natural History of German Life” defines realism’s morally beneficial effect on readers and viewers in terms of the communion imperative, as eliciting a sense of connection between oneself and other persons and humanity more generally, she conversely regards the “grave evil” of idyllic misrepresentations in terms of the morally harmful effect such misrepresentations have on readers and viewers. She defines this harmful effect as essentially the negation of the communion imperative, as a separation of people, a reinforcement of mental and circumstantial distinctions and disconnections between different persons. Coming back once more to the topic of class differences and hierarchies, she critiques Charles Dickens on this basis, for what she regards as his idyllic misrepresentations of working-class people:

[Dickens’s] preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic boatmen and courtezans, [are] as noxious as Eugène Sue’s idealized proletaires in encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and want; or that the working-classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of altruism, wherein everyone is caring for everyone else, and no one for himself. (E 271–72)

Eliot’s argument about Dickens is essentially the reverse of the argument she makes about realism. In the case of the latter, she maintains, the meticulous depiction of human beings as they are, in all their flaws and differences, ultimately serves to arouse in us a moral feeling of human connection and commonality. Whereas Dickens, she implies, depicts his working-class characters not as they truly are, but as idealized mirror images of what are fundamentally his own values and of those of his implied middle- and upper-class reader, as innately moral, refined, and altruistic. This idyllic misrepresentation, she suggests, is not only untrue. It also does not truly elevate the working class morally, nor serve to bring the classes together. Rather, it serves, however inadvertently, to separate them: to widen and exacerbate the social, material, and mental gaps between classes and between persons of different classes. It does this by misrepresenting class inequalities and working-class poverty and ignorance, what Eliot calls “harsh social relations,” as a source of high morality and refined sentiments in working-class characters, thereby implicitly legitimating and perpetuating those same inequalities. Whereas harsh social relations and inequalities, Eliot argues in her essay, are precisely what art should help to reform and ameliorate, not work to endorse.⁷

In chapter 17 of Adam Bede, Eliot’s narrator insists similarly to “The Natural History of German Life” on the mimetic imperative for art and literature to depict human beings and the world truthfully, and particularly to depict working-class life and working-class people truthfully: “let Art always remind us of [common coarse people] … let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things” (196–97). And the narrator also insists, again similarly to “The Natural History,” on the moral imperative for the reader or viewer to learn to feel empathy for other human beings, no matter how different from oneself they are, or how morally and physically flawed and distasteful they may appear:

But, my good friend, what will you do then with your fellow-parishioner who opposes your husband in the vestry? – with your newly-appointed vicar, whose style of preaching you find painfully below that of his regretted predecessor? – with the honest servant who worries your soul with her one failing? – with your neighbour, Mrs. Green, who was really kind to you in your last illness, but has said several ill-natured things about you since your convalescence? – nay, with your excellent husband himself, who has other irritating habits besides that of not wiping his shoes? These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions, and it is these people – amongst whom your life is passed – that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire – for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. (194)

In this passage, the narrator only implies what Eliot states explicitly in “The Natural History,” that there is a correlation between these two imperatives. By depicting persons and things as they are, in all their flaws and complexity, he suggests, realist art and literature ultimately arouse not contempt but empathy, what he calls tolerance and pity and love, for other persons in the minds of viewers and readers.⁸ Eliot makes this correlation between truthful representation and empathy explicit in an 1857 letter to her editor John Blackwood, “My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy” (L 2:299).

As Eliot also does in “The Natural History of German Life,” the narrator in Adam Bede defines realism’s moral efficacy in terms of the communion imperative. In the passage I quote in the previous paragraph, he maintains that human beings are compelled to feel empathy for one another in the first instance because they live together in communities. It is the people, he insists, “amongst whom your life is passed,” our fellow-parishioner, our vicar, our servant, our neighbor, our husband, whom we are required to tolerate and love, and presumably so because our life is passed among them. Elsewhere he similarly exhorts himself, “I want a great deal of [love and reverence] for my everyday fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch” (197). The narrator of “Amos Barton” similarly defines his aim to his reader, “I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles … sorrow such as may live next door to you” (SCL 59).

But human proximity and contact are for the Adam Bede narrator not only the motives for empathy. They are also the form that human empathy takes, the form as which empathy for other human beings manifests itself, as a tactile connection or physical contiguity, for instance, that transcends the separateness or differences from one another of different persons, and that mitigates the inner and outer distastefulness of other people:

It is … needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely-assorted cravat and waistcoat … needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent, and in other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson … (197)

The transcendence the narrator describes and exhorts in himself here is not only that of human faultiness and ugliness by his intuition of human goodness, but also that of human disconnection by his realization of human connectedness.

Following the general line of argument from “The Natural History of German Life,” the narrator in chapter 17 contrasts realist art and literature with what he calls idealizing art and literature, what “The Natural History” calls idyllic art and literature. He censures the latter for its morally adverse effect on readers and viewers, and similarly to “The Natural History” defines that adverse effect as a negation of the communion imperative, of a sense in the reader or viewer of connection with other persons and with humankind generally. In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Communion and Difference in the Ethical Relationship
• 1 The Defective Mirror: The Ethics of Realism in Adam Bede and “The Natural History of German Life”
• 2 The Pier Glass Effect: Narrative Ethics in Middlemarch
• 3 Egoism and Empathy in Middlemarch
• 4 “The Balance of Separateness and Communication”: Cosmopolitan Ethics in Daniel Deronda
• 5 The Concept of Separateness in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”
• 6 Moral and Multilingualism in Impressions of Theophrastus Such
• Bibliography
• Index