George Eliot: Middlemarch

Abstract

THE VITAL INFLUENCE George Eliot was often taken to task by contemporary reviewers for the persistent scientific allusions in her works. Henry James, indeed, complained that ‘ Middlemarch is too often an echo of Messrs. Darwin and Huxley’. And R. H. Hutton objected to her use of the word ‘dynamic’ in the opening sentences of Daniel Deronda as being pedantically overscientific: ‘Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance?’ The surprise that any modern reader is likely to feel at Hutton's particular objection should alert us to the degree to which language that has now lost its scientific bearing still bore a freight of controversy and assertion for George Eliot and her first readers. If, in the light of James's remark, one turns to the Prelude to Middlemarch words that may now read as flat generality renew their powers of controversy. The concluding paragraph asserts ironically the problems of treating the social lot of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favourite love-stories in prose and verse. (1;1:2–3) To take up only one of several possible words from that passage: ‘variation’.