Illiberalism and the Exception in George Eliot's Early Writing

Abstract

Over the past two decades, studies of the Victorian novel have been enriched significantly by a growing body of scholarship looking to the literature and letters of the period to affirm for the twenty-first century the theoretical and practical value of liberal conceptualizations of critical detachment and communicative decision-making procedures. In the process, the works of George Eliot (1819–1880) have come to be understood not only as modeling forms of critical detachment and rational decision-making but also as important contributors to what Amanda Anderson has identified as “the emergence of the [Habermasian] public sphere in Enlightenment Europe, a historical condition in which critique, argument, and debate inform developing political practices and institutions,” which “helped to consolidate … the legitimating force of public opinion and the rule of law, the successor to now delegitimated forms of absolute sovereignty.” However, I will argue here that Eliot's early writing in particular demonstrates a distinct lack of faith in the power of liberalism and its political procedures and that Eliot's early work in fact exposes the illiberal tendencies embedded in these procedures. Rather than asserting the authority of the public sphere, Eliot's important early novelsAdam Bede(1859) andThe Mill on the Floss(1860) consistently look beyond themselves, so to speak, to a providential authority that exceeds the tenets of realism in their efforts to resolve conflict and provide closure to the novels. For each novel, aesthetic coherence is secured not through “critique, argument, and debate” but through recourse to metaphysics and to extrasocial and/or extraprocedural decisions. In the following pages I align this phenomenon in Eliot's early writing with the controversial German legal scholar Carl Schmitt's concept of the exception in order to argue that, by appealing to the logic of providence to resolve their most intractable legal and ethical problems, these early novels in fact demonstrate Eliot's awareness of the practical limitations of proceduralism as a legitimate decision-making instrument.