George Eliot's Feminism

The Right to Rebellion

June Szirotny

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137406156
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The question of whether or not George Eliot was what would now be called a feminist is a contentious one. This book argues, through a close study of her fiction, informed by examination of her life's story and by a comparison of her views to those of contemporary feminists, that George Eliot was more radical and more feminist than commonly thought.

1

“Janet’s Repentance”

“Entire Submission, Perfect Resignation”

“Janet’s Repentance” resembles a contemporary moral tale,¹ in which an idealist’s rebellious struggle against brutal wife abuse, leading to her alcoholism, is resolved by her wifely submission. The story is thus a saint’s life, in which George Eliot endorses her heroine’s selflessness, ostensibly as doing good, but more clearly than ever afterward revealing a sacrificial ethic rooted in George Eliot’s discarded Evangelical Christianity.

At the same time, George Eliot, writing in 1857, in a decade in which national attention was focused on domestic violence and divorce,² is covertly attacking patriarchy’s concept of marriage. In the most ambitious of the stories in her first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, she is supporting feminists’ critical view of unhappy marital relations.

i

George Eliot carefully prepares the scene of domestic violence in which Janet first appears. In the early 1830s (ii, 58a; L, II:347), which Mary Ann, coming of age, regarded as the dark ages for women, we see Mr. Dempster, a successful lawyer, egoistic and overbearing, securing support for persecuting the new Evangelical clergyman, Mr. Tryan, and we learn that Janet, Dempster’s wife, is known for her charitable works, but, fearful of her husband, has taken to drink (iii, 70ab).

Returning home after his evening drinking, Dempster knocks on his door, using his key when Janet doesn’t answer. Furious because she keeps him waiting in the dark, he beats her. We have to do here with a middle-class, professional man, who is “the drunken tyrant of a dreary midnight home” (vii, 195a), counterposing the common assumption that wife abuse was confined to the lower classes. Even feminist Frances Power Cobbe, in her influential article on wife-beating,³ in 1878, lamenting that men’s serious offenses against women were regarded as minor,⁴ writes: “Wife-beating exists in the upper and middle classes rather more, I fear, than is generally recognised; but it rarely extends to anything beyond an occasional blow or two of a not dangerous kind. . . . The dangerous wife-beater belongs almost exclusively to the artisan and labouring classes.”⁵

Moreover, the woman, “standing stupidly unmoved in her great beauty, while the heavy arm is lifted to strike her” (iv, 76b), is drunk. Again readers would have been shocked, for they, like Dempster, have a double standard about drinking. He says, “advancing with his slow drunken step. ‘What, you’ve been drinking again, have you? I’ll beat you into your senses’” (iv, 76b). Drinking is not feminine.⁶ In fact, one writer says Janet, “the first detailed portrait of a middle-class, female alcoholic, is unique in nineteenth-century English fiction,”⁷ and George Eliot wrote, in 1859, that she thinks Janet “the least popular of my characters” (L, III:35). But George Eliot, having known “the real Janet” (L, II:347),⁸ is determined to tell the painful truth (L, II:348), quashing the patriarchal myths that comforted her fellowmen.⁹

A little over a year before writing this scene, George Eliot had applauded Barbara Smith’s petition “praying that married women may have a legal right to their own earnings, as a counteractive to wife-beating and other evils” (L, II:225), and there are brief references in several of George Eliot’s novels to domestic violence in the middle class.¹⁰ In “Janet’s Repentance,” she focuses on this as an intractable evil, which was a growing concern of the Women’s Movement from the 1870s.¹¹ Common law had made physical correction of women legal¹² until, in 1829, the Act of Charles II, which embodied the old common law and authorized a man “to chastise his wife with any reasonable instrument,” was annulled,¹³ but legal opinion on chastisement remained ambivalent until 1891.¹⁴

As Dempster’s drinking worsens, Janet’s “home misery” (xiii, 339a) deepens. Lacking the love of children to feed “her poor hungry heart,” she cannot endure Dempster’s “brutal hatred” (xiii, 339b) without drinking. Dempster’s mother, in whom there is an “absence of mental strength,” and who seems to have been created in order to represent the conventional point of view, thinks that her son would not have gone wrong if he had married “a meek woman like herself who would have borne him children, and been a deft, orderly housekeeper” (vii, 195b), who made herself a slave to all her husband’s wishes without caring to make a fuss about loving him (xiii, 339b). But the narrator hastens to make it clear that Janet, whose white wedding gown symbolizes her innocence (iii, 70a),¹⁵ is blameless. “[D]o not believe that it was anything either present or wanting in poor Janet that formed the motive of her husband’s cruelty. Cruelty . . . requires no motive outside itself—it only requires opportunity.” And brandy gave the opportunity. “[A]n unloving, tyrannous, brutal man needs no motive to prompt his cruelty; he needs only the perpetual presence of a woman he can call his own. A whole park full of . . . animals . . . would not serve him so well to glut his lust of torture; they could not feel as one woman does; they could not throw out the keen retort which whets the edge of hatred” (xiii, 340a). And, under coverture, any man can call his wife his own, that is, “his PROPERTY, in the sense in which a horse is his property,” for we know from slave-owning mentality that men assume they can do as they like with their property.¹⁶

But Janet “was not to be made meek by cruelty; she would repent of nothing in the face of injustice.” It is when “[p]roud, angry resistance and sullen endurance were . . . almost the only alternatives she knew” (xiii, 340a) that the last contest between her and Dempster takes place. On an evening when he is expecting dinner guests, Janet laid out his fresh clothes. When he throws them at her, she determines she will leave them for the guests to see (xiv, 343a). For the first time, her resentment overcomes her pride in hiding her griefs from the world, but George Eliot, who never regards servility as a virtue, gives no indication that rebellious Janet is morally wrong here. At midnight, when the guests have left, Dempster, angry over her defiance, rousing her out of bed and threatening to kill her, thrusts her, in her night dress, out of doors into the March cold (xiv, 344ab). The scene is particularly terrible because it conjures up that in which Othello, another madman, murders his innocent wife.

Becoming benumbed with cold, she goes to the home of her friend Mrs. Pettifer. There, considering her options, she cannot think of a practical solution to “her old life of terror, and stupor, and fevered despair” (xvi, 460a). She knows Dempster would never consent to a separation. The law might give her some protection “if she could prove her life in danger from him,” but “she shrank utterly . . . from any active, public resistance . . . : she felt too crushed, too faulty, too liable to reproach . . . to put herself openly in the position of a wronged woman seeking redress. She had no strength to sustain her in a course of self-defence . . . : there was a darker shadow over her life than the dread of her husband—it was the shadow of self-despair” (xvi, 460b). Even though, in her wild despairing anguish, she reflects that “[t]he easiest thing would be to go away and hide herself from him” (xvi, 460b), she cannot face the difficulties attending separation. She fears not only that he would persecute her mother but that she herself would find starting life afresh without the support of faith or love impossibly hard. And she cannot choose death (xv, 458ab); she had tried to commit suicide (xiv, 342a). “Better this misery than the blank that lay for her outside her married home” (xiii, 340a). Furthermore, her reluctance to defend herself is understandable in a patriarchal society that, while regarding Dempster’s physical abuse as “beyond what was reasonable,” tolerated drunkenness and wife-beating,¹⁷ criticizing Janet, who had had a “superior education” (iii, 70a), as proud and unconventional (iii, 70a–71a; xiii, 339b, 341a). Having shown that Janet’s situation is intolerable, George Eliot implicitly protests that, under common law, it is irremediable.¹⁸

But once Janet is out of reach of her husband, her complaint changes. Previously his abuse was her problem, but now alcoholism becomes her problem. Before her escape from home, George Eliot, in referring to Mrs. Raynor’s prediction that Janet will be “sobbing out her griefs with selfish passion” (v, 192b), complaining that “God is cruel” to have made her bear such misery (xiv, 342a), and in the narrator’s statement that Janet might have been saved from much sin and therefore much sorrow if she had been a mother (xiii, 239b–240a), has only twice suggested that Janet has some responsibility for her misery. We only learn after her escape that “her sorrows and her sins” (xv, 427b) are her drinking. Then, for the first time, the narrator says her main problem is not dread of physical abuse but the “self-despair,” from which she has sought oblivion in drinking—“that evil habit, which she loathed in retrospect and yet was powerless to resist” (xvi, 460b).

Depicted at first as a victim, she becomes a wrongdoer (her story is Janet’s repentance). In confessing to Mr. Tryan, she emphasizes her drinking, which makes her do “wrong” (xviii, 464b), and he refers repeatedly to her drinking as her “sin” (xviii, 465a, 466a, 467a; xix, 468b) and “evil habits” (xviii, 467a). Under his influence, she almost forgets the abuse; persuaded that her trouble is thinking only of herself (xxviii, 467b), she realizes that her sin, symbolized by her drinking, is “minding about pleasure” (xviii, 467a). Contrasting herself with self-denying Mr. Tryan and the missionary Henry Martyn (xxiii, 523a), on whom the former is modeled,¹⁹ she says, “I was only angry and discontented because I had pain to bear” (xviii, 467b). What she really wants is to find a way to endure her misery and thus avoid being “goaded into sin by woman’s bitterest sorrows” (v, 192b).²⁰ Mr. Tryan explains that “desiring to have our own will, seeking happiness in the things of this world” is “rebellion against God,” which makes us breathe poisoned air (xviii, 467a). “There is nothing that becomes us but entire submission, perfect resignation” (xviii, 467b).²¹ Janet’s husband out of the way, George Eliot focuses on her heroine’s problem as primarily a spiritual one, and Janet, who says she has “left off minding about pleasure” and “could be contented in the midst of hardship” (xviii, 467a), seems regenerated, by the only means George Eliot’s characters are regenerated, by another’s loving solicitude. “Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another!” George Eliot exclaims. “Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasselled flower” (xix, 468b).

The rest of the story is concerned with testing Janet’s newfound self. Converted, she again feels concern for others (xxii, 522ab; xxiii, 523ab), including her husband—concern that “had always been her purest enjoyment” (xxv, 530a) before her miseries had become severe, when she was seldom seen “going about on her good-natured errands” (xiii, 340b). She tells Mr. Tryan that she would like to go back to Robert and “try to make up for what has been wrong in me.” She says she has “the same dread of his anger and cruelty, and it seems to me as if I should never be able to bear it without falling into the same sins” (xxii, 522ab). Yet, like Marian, who wrote that she has “often felt the superiority of a large tolerance which will hardly allow any ground for complete alienation from the once known and once loved” (L, III:456), Janet is uneasy about any voluntary breach. “It seems a dreadful thing in life, when any one has been so near to one as a husband for fifteen years, to part and be nothing to each other any more. Surely that is a very strong tie, and I feel as if my duty can never lie quite away from it.” Mr. Tryan counsels: “Cast yourself on God, and trust that He will direct you” (xxii, 522b). So ends discussion about separating from her abusive husband.

The next day, when she discovers that Robert is seriously ill, she immediately assumes her place by his bedside, seeing her sick-room ministrations as an imperative duty, which sweeps aside all doubt about returning to him. “[W]here a human being lies prostrate, . . . the moral relation of man to man is reduced to its utmost clearness. . . . As we bend over the sick-bed, all the forces of our nature rush towards the channels of pity, of patience, and of love” (xxiv, 525ab).²² Motivated by a “benign impulse,” she feels relief from “the burthen of decision” (xxiv, 525a, 525b)²³ about returning to her married home. “[I]n a moment,” she determines to return and “wait on [Robert] with . . . such all-forgiving love, that the old harshness and cruelty must melt away for ever” (xxiv, 525b). Penitent and submissive, confident that she would not be drawn to sin and despair again (xxiv, 526a), she is selflessly bent on doing good.

But now dying Dempster is no longer the threat that would ultimately test her submissiveness. Unable to resolve the issue of her relation to a recovered Robert (no one around her feels any certainty about what she should do), George Eliot, by a deus ex machina,²⁴ kills one to whom long-term submission is unthinkable. Saved by Dempster’s death, submissive Janet seems to be patriarchy’s model wife (and George Eliot patriarchy’s advocate) without having to demonstrate that she is such. George Eliot, who early had seen an incompatible marriage for herself as hell, will not prove that Janet becomes absolutely submissive under all circumstances by having her return to continued abuse from a recovered husband. She will not show Janet’s resignation as harming herself any more than Scott will show Jeanie’s truth-telling harming another in Heart of Midlothian. While writing the story, Marian advised Sara Hennell not to publish with Chapman because “self-defeating actions do no one any good” (L, II:377). Despite George Eliot’s admiration for self-sacrifice, she will not recommend sacrifice that is absolutely intolerable. In none of George Eliot’s stories of marital incompatibility, does she ever show patriarchy’s ideal of the reconciliation of estranged husband and wife within their home. Forcing two mismatched persons to live together could, she thought, issue in no good.

The story does not end with Dempster’s death. Desirous of showing that Janet’s transformation is permanent, George Eliot concerns herself with proving that all sign of Janet’s selfishness, her alcoholism, the “refuge of despair” (xv, 457a), has disappeared. Counseled by Mr. Tryan, she ultimately succeeds in refusing to yield to temptation when lonely and depressed. The occasion is a baptismal epoch (xxv, 533b), signifying her perfect selflessness: thereafter she is occupied with “works of love and mercy” (xxvi, 534a), especially with a generous scheme to ease Mr. Tryan’s decline. But the true significance of her repenting the self-indulgence that motivated her drinking is not that she does good but that she attains purity and holiness (xxv, 532a), the “power to subdue self” (xxvii, 539a). In overcoming her “‘spiritual’ weaknesses,” George Eliot is revealing that her real interest is not in Janet’s doing go...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 “Janet’s Repentance”
• 2 Adam Bede
• 3 The Mill on the Floss
• 4 Silas Marner
• 5 Romola
• 6 The Spanish Gypsy
• 7 Felix Holt
• 8 Middlemarch
• 9 Daniel Deronda
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index of Proper Names