How Anxiety Became Ordinary: Middlemarch, Feeling, and Serial Form

Abstract

Histories of feeling in the nineteenth century have often focused on discourses of sympathy. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is one text in particular that has been studied in terms of sympathy and novelistic form. In this article I argue that another feeling, anxiety, impacts the form of Middlemarch. I turn to the serial publication of the novel in order to demonstrate that the novel is formally anxious, and to argue that this anxiety produces the sympathy for which the novel is so well known. In terms of its form, I describe Middlemarch as an ambivalent synthesis between three narrative trajectories: the individual protagonists, the community of Middlemarch, and the narrator, whose voice anxiously mediates relations between the first two, often with the aim of producing sympathy, though the anxious tone of the narrator’s voice disturbs its sympathetic project. As the novel unfolds, the narrative temporality is arrested by the overwhelming affective experiences of particular characters, and in order to get the narrative moving again, the narrator must integrate that affective experience into the ordinary, everyday emotion of the community. In other words, the novel makes anxiety part of the ordinary lives of its characters, and through the serial form of the narrative I suggest that this anxiety becomes an ordinary part of its readers’ lives as well. While it is likely that an affect like anxiety has always existed, under this period of capitalist modernity anxiety becomes an ordinary, everyday feeling. But the ordinary way in which we describe this feeling as “anxiety” has a history dating back to at least the early nineteenth century. My purpose in this article is to begin to construct a genealogy of anxiety as an ordinary feeling, using Middlemarch’s serialization as my case study.