Mountains in labour: Eliot’s ‘Atrocities’ and Woolf’s alternatives

Abstract

Virginia Woolf was in two minds about George Eliot. On the one hand, she called Middlemarch ‘magnificent’ and described it as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’. On the other, she said that Eliot wrote in the typical ‘male’ sentence of the early 19th century, with which she committed ‘atrocities that beggar description’. In this paper, we use Michael Halliday’s systemic-functional linguistics to describe some of these ‘atrocities’: long clause-complexes, heavy use of abstract nouns, and delicately balanced pairs of clauses that contrast in polarity, for example, ‘not … but …’. We show, however, that they only form the crust of the book and outer layers of each chapter: they are concentrated in the prelude, the finale and in the narrative passages rather than in the ‘magnificent’ dialogue. Woolf’s own work then fuses this dialogue with narrative by transforming it into inner speech and allowing this inner speech to narrate the story. What unites Woolf to Eliot is their shared conviction that it is the ridiculous mice of little life which move the mountains of literature.