George Eliot's Hypothesis of Reality

Abstract

HE IMAGE OF GEORGE ELIOT, bending forward, listening during one of her regular Sundays with selfless and disciplined attention to her admiring visitors, corresponds precisely to the moral and intellectual ideal that informs her novels. Such an ideal, from a very modern perspective, at least, entails the denial of the libidinal energies essential to psychic health, and we point knowingly now to George Eliot's headaches and fragile health. But the denial we may abhor was, for George Eliot, both an ethical and intellectual imperative. Ironically (especially from the perspective of contemporary feminist criticism), she believed that submission of the self to the voices of external reality'was a condition of intellectual power. The failures of Lydgate and Casaubon result primarily from the failure to submit, that is, to restrain their egoistic needs from influencing their intellectual work. It is not only that reality remains incommensurate with the desires of an aspiring self (a convention of narrative since at least Don Quixote), but that personality is an obstruction to perception. The common self is merely personality. The attentive George Eliot of the Sundays at home was, we know, a deliberate fiction; to put it another way, it was an hypothesis testing the possibility of the abolition of the common self (to which George Eliot felt herself to be humiliatingly subject), to