The Ends of History

Victorians and "the Woman Question"

Christina Crosby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136248313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Why were the Victorians so passionate about "History"?

How did this passion relate to another Victorian obsession – the "woman question"? In a brilliant and provocative study, Christina Crosby investigates the links between the Victorians' fascination with "history" and with the nature of "women."

Discussing both key novels and non-literary texts – Daniel Deronda and Hegel's Philosophy of History; Henry Esmond and Macaulay's History of England; Little Dorrit, Wilkie Collins' The Frozen Deep, and Mayhew's survey of "labour and the poor"; Villette, Patrick Fairburn's The Typology of Scripture and Ruskin's Modern Painters – she argues that the construction of middle-class Victorian "man" as the universal subject of history entailed the identification of "women" as those who are before, beyond, above, or below history. Crosby's analysis raises a crucial question for today's feminists – how can one read historically without replicating the problem of nineteenth century "history"?

The book was first published in 1991.

Chapter 1
George Eliot’s apocalypse of history

When reading reviews of Daniel Deronda, George Eliot’s last, big novel, one must be impressed with her pre-eminent position among British novelists in the 1870s. She is hailed as a “Prophetess of Humanity,” her books are acclaimed as a “national blessing,” and are said to be “more like Bibles than books of mere amusement.”¹ Eliot is no longer a “Prophetess,” perhaps, but she is canonized, celebrated as a great philosophical novelist who represents crucial issues of modern life: the relation of the individual to society, the necessity of knowing the limits of individual life and of submitting to the corporate, historical life of humanity as a whole. Read by her contemporaries as a guide to living rightly, Eliot still enjoys the prestige of the moralist, and is known as the great author of humanism.

Much of the voluminous criticism of her work has concentrated on analyzing the complex development of her characters as moral subjects and on studying the paradoxical relations of individual will and historical determinism developed in her books. Critics have explicated Eliot’s repeated insistence on submission, her conviction that the individual must submit to the great impersonal forces of history which work on and through one, and her sometimes violent demonstrations of the impossibility of escaping from the determining influences of the past. Tito’s horrible death at the hands of his adoptive father in Romola is an instance of this logic, as is the fall of Bulstrode in Middlemarch. But the book which insists most relentlessly on submission is Daniel Deronda. In this, Eliot’s most strikingly “world-historical” novel, she develops in detail the workings of the “Invisible Power,” as she calls the forces of history, and dramatizes the sometimes painful pressure this impersonal power exerts on individual lives. The overriding question, then, is how the individual will respond to this pressure, whether he or she will be knowledgeable enough to comprehend both the absolute limits of mortal human life and the glory of man’s “corporate existence.”

There is in Daniel Deronda a very explicit, even obsessive development of the problems of power, submission, and knowledge. But rather than accepting the terms of Eliot’s humanism, I take Daniel Deronda to be a coercive text, a text which is not so much the apocalyptic revelation of the Invisible Power of world history as it is a dramatization of the workings of knowledge and power which produce the moral and historical subject as an effect.² Explicitly concerned with the discipline that is crucial to the great humanist project, Daniel Deronda is simultaneously Eliot’s most strongly idealist book and her most disturbing text, disturbing precisely because the idealizing moves are also power plays, and the emphasis on the ideal is matched by an obsession with power which collapses the comforting opposition of the individual and society by suggesting that the humanist subject is in part an effect of a distinctly untranscendent exercise of power.³

Further, Daniel Deronda makes strikingly manifest the link between a certain concept of history and the production of the subject. This is especially evident in the famous division of the novel into two parts, an ideal, world-historical half (the Jewish half), and an experiential, psychological, domestic half (Gwendolen Harleth’s half). The story of Gwendolen is in many ways a familiar one, that of a vain young woman’s moral education. But the story of the prophetic Mordecai, his vision of the restoration of Israel as a modern state, and Deronda’s enthusiastic embrace of Judaism has little precedence in British literature, and readers from Eliot’s time to now have wondered what Gwendolen has to do with the Jews and vice versa. Why raise “the woman question” (for Gwendolen is exemplary of the woman as spectacle, enigma, problem) and “the Jewish question” (the question of the “superlative peculiarity” of the Jews, to use Eliot’s phrase, the problem of their difference) in the same book?

An answer is suggested by the insistent duality of the text which is organized around a related series of paired oppositions: individual and collective, empirical and ideal, psychologic and philosophic, particular and world-historical. The text is structured by these distinctions, and in each case the second term, denned in contrast to the first, subsumes its opposite. Eliot’s last novel produces differences only to overcome them, demonstrating repeatedly how the ideal triumphantly incorporates the diversity of “facts” into an all-embracing totality. Indeed, Daniel Deronda displays the necessary conceptual link between empiricism and idealism, the two poles of modern thought, demonstrating that neither can function without the other. This is the logic, then, which produces the duality of the novel’s plot in which man’s historical identity, his ideal humanity, is secured at woman’s expense. These are the abstract categories – Man, Woman – which this richly detailed novel helps to consolidate.

That Gwendolen comes to stand for the unhistorical, untranscendent particularity of woman is not surprising, but it does seem strange that Eliot would choose the Jews to represent historical man, given that nineteenth-century anti-Semitism positions the Jews as alien, anachronistic, a foreign body inimical to collective health. In fact, it is precisely to combat such vulgar prejudice that Eliot idealizes the Jews, for she sees in anti-Semitism a pernicious ignorance of history. For Eliot, the Jews are no anachronism, but rather the embodiment of the “ideal forces” of history, and the survival of Judaism over millennia is the best evidence of the power of history to conserve as well as to destroy. However, as we will see, idealizing the Jews and punishing women are but two poles of the same problem, and both Jews and women are set up in Daniel Deronda only to confirm the everlasting unity of Man. Eliot works in this novel to account for two troubling threats to the unity of humanity, the difference of the Jews and the difference of women, finding in the first an ideal instance of history and in the second the absolute limit of world history. But in fact, the Jews fare little better than women in this scheme, since before they can become the representative historical subjects, the specificity and materiality of the Jews and Judaism must be radically disavowed.

While writing Daniel Deronda (the book was begun in 1873 and published in eight parts, beginning in 1876), Eliot offered in a letter a now famous definition of her work.

My writing is simply a set of experiments in life – an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of – what stores of motive, actual or hinted as possible, give promise of a better after which we may strive – what gains from past revelations and discipline we must strive to keep hold of as something more sure than shifting theory.

She goes on to say, “I become more and more timid, with less daring to adopt any formula which does not get itself clothed for me in some human figure and individual experience….”⁴ While Eliot speaks of her timidity, the effect of this definition is quite the contrary, for she is laying claim to the authority of the scientist and the veracity of the scientific experiment. The characteristically Victorian deference to science is evident in her definition of her writing as a scientific enterprise; further, the respect due to science should be due also to her novels, these “experiments” designed to investigate hypotheses about human life. Certainly Eliot anticipated the social sciences in the extensive research she undertook when preparing to write her later large books, and her accumulation of information is evident in the detail with which she is able to reproduce fifteenth-century Florence in Romola or the particulars of Jewish history and controversies about Jewish identity in Daniel Deronda. As George Henry Lewes wrote to her publisher, “You are surprised at her knowledge of the Jews? But only learned Rabbis are so profoundly versed in Jewish history and literature as she is…. What a stupendous genius it is!”⁵ It is clear that her contemporaries were rather awe-struck with her learning, and there is something awesome in a “research program” that includes mastering Hebrew in order to write a novel.

Eliot’s declared timidity is not to be dismissed as a false note, however, for in Eliot’s conception of her work as experimental there is a double gesture of submitting to the facts and mastering the facts. Indeed, her mastery, and the truths she is able to discover, depend on her attentiveness to particular human figures and individual experience, and the results of her investigations depend on her restricting herself to the evidence. Lord Acton, in a letter written to a friend a few days after Eliot’s death, offers a suggestive description of this process:

George Eliot seemed to me capable not only of reading the diverse hearts of men, but of creeping into their skin, seeing the world through their eyes, feeling their latent background of conviction, discerning theory and habit, influences of thought and knowledge, of life and of descent, and having obtained this experience, recovering her independence, stripping off the borrowed shell, and exposing scientifically and indifferently the soul of a Vestal, a Crusader, an Anabaptist….⁶

The objects of Eliot’s investigations are stripped, exposed, discarded in a thoroughly objectifying operation, but not before Eliot has assumed their positions. Further, the second move, the reduction of the subjects of the experiments to objects, is for Acton the condition of the truth of the books, and Eliot’s revelation of how men think “who live in the grasp of various systems” suggests the possibility of being free from such a grasp, the promise of pure knowledge.

As readers of Eliot rather than Eliot herself we are evidently to do as Acton does, submit to her superior knowledge and be thankful that she can, as he says, “give rational form to motives [one has] imperfectly analysed.” This submission is the condition of a better life, one conducted in fuller knowledge of both limits and possibilities. But there is another kind of coercion here, one more problematic. For Eliot, all research always reveals the same thing, the truth of man’s social and historical being, the promise that man may one day live in the full knowledge of his individual mortality and his corporate potential. That is, Eliot’s “experiments” always have the same results. No matter what the evidence, in every novel the same philosophical-moral dilemmas are posed and the same revelations of man’s paradoxically historical being are made. Thus the experiment in fifteenth-century Florentine life made in Romola, for instance, and the Jewish experiment of Daniel Deronda come to the same conclusions. Savonarola’s Catholicism and republicanism are identical to Mordecai’s Judaism and Zionism; identical, that is, in their latent meanings known only to Eliot – who then takes care that we readers can also analyse the truths inherent in any great religious system or political movement. So when Eliot strips off the borrowed shell of a particular human figure or individual experience, she also strips away the specificity of that figure, of that historical time. The massive accumulation of evidence is crucial for the creation of certain reality-effects, but finally every fact is only the means to an end, man himself – man reduced to an object of study yet full of almost unthinkable potential.⁷

Eliot, of course, was widely read in modern philosophy – she was perhaps the most masterfully informed of Victorian novelists – and her philosophical positions repeat and justify her “experimental” method. In Daniel Deronda, as elsewhere in her writing, Eliot is engaged with the problem of managing finitude, of making the limits of human being the condition of transcendence. When writing Daniel Deronda, Eliot thought often of death, of her own death and perhaps even more of Lewes’s. In her letters she repeatedly mentions their bad health, and the unavoidable fact of their corporeal existence. Death, Eliot writes,

is what I think of almost daily. For death seems to me now a close, real experience, like the approach of autumn or winter, and I am glad to find that advancing life brings this power of imagining the nearness of death….⁸

The rather unexpected turn in which Eliot is glad to be able to imagine death is of interest not so much as a biographical detail, but as a wonderfully clear instance of the particular sacrifices she believes are required if one is to realize the ideal, the higher, historical life of humanity which supersedes one’s own. Recognizing that being human is a subjection to forces beyond one’s control, knowing that human life depends on conditions that are barely comprehensible – this is the submission that is necessary if one is ever to grasp the workings of what Eliot calls in Daniel Deronda the “Invisible Power.” But, of course, although this power is invisible, its effects are evident. Indeed, the only way Eliot can know this transcendent force is through the observable facts of human life.

Knowledge of the Invisible Power is thus available to a “powerful imagination,” which Eliot defines in a late essay as

a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh wholes; … a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories, … bringing into new light the less obvious relations of human existence.⁹

But this “veracious imagination” (as she calls it in another place) might be better known as the voracious imagination: it swallows up even the tiniest bit of experience, even the smallest fact, in a process which transforms everything into an embodiment of the ideal.¹⁰ The facts of life, then, including the fact of death, become the evidence of a totality which transcends individual experience. While Eliot is by no means alone in the project of managing finitude – the period is famous for the disappearance of God and the consequences of that absence – she is one of the most “ardently theoretical” of novelists dedicated to the project of finding in history a deferred transcendence.”¹¹

Of her novels, her last one displays most clearly the triumph of the ideal and the costs of transcendence. Daniel Deronda is a lengthy demonstration of the effects of the impersonal invisible power of history and insists in no uncertain terms on the necessity of submission to this power as the condition for the salvation of human life. But in the recurrent insistence on submission, and especially in the different effects of power in the divided plot of the novel, Daniel Deronda displays power working in decidedly untranscendent ways.

The Jewish half of the novel represents the ideal union of individual and collective life in the character of Mordecai and his vision of the restoration of Israel as a nation in Palestine. This part is philosophical, didactic, prophetic. The Gwendolen half domesticates the novel by telling a familiar story of a proud young woman’s moral education by way of courtship and marriage. It is distinctly unideal, showing English life as shallow, mercenary, and exploitative. Gwendolen, as the heroine of this half, is granted a sensitivity lacking in the rest of the English, a susceptibility that will allow her to comprehend, to a point, the insignificance of her individual life, the forces of world history, the higher knowledge that comes from submission to the invisible power. Whereas the Jewish half is dominated by philosophical discussions and prophetic visions, Gwendolen’s half is much more dramatically developed, more psychological than philosophical. George Eliot, disturbed at “readers who cut the book into scraps, and talk of nothing in it but Gwendolen” defended the unity of the novel, writing in a letter, “I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there.’”¹² However, this frequently cited declaration of her intent hasn’t stopped critics from objecting to the incongruity of the parts, perhaps the most famous recent criticism coming from F. R. Leavis even as he induced Eliot into The Great Tradition.¹³ He dismisses the Jewish sections of the novel as “fervid and wordy,” and proposes to save the novel by keeping what’s good – Gwendolen’s story, which develops her as “a responsible moral agent … amenable to moral judgement” – and throwing away the rest. But an earlier reviewer of the novel realized that turning Daniel Deronda into Gwendolen Harleth won’t work, because everything in the novel is related to everything else, even if not quite in the ideal way Eliot imagines. Henry ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 George Eliot’s apocalypse of history
• 2 Henry Esmond and the subject of history
• 3 History and the melodramatic fix
• 4 Villette and the end of history
• 5 Conclusion: the high cost of history
• Notes
• Index