‘My first bit of art’: Scenes of Clerical Life

Abstract

Eliot’s determination to exemplify the artistic credo she had so extensively enunciated through her literary journalism is evident at every turn in Scenes of Clerical Life. To begin with, the stories are insistently unromantic. The narrator of ‘Amos Barton’, for example, affects a simplicity of mind and incapacity of invention to explain the mundanity of his tale. He maintains that his ‘only merit’ lies in ‘faithfulness’ (50), and warns readers in search of ‘thrilling incident’ to look elsewhere to the more fashionable novels of ‘the last season’ (37). Similarly, Eliot’s first protagonist, Amos Barton, is adamantly unheroic, ‘the quintessential extract of mediocrity’ (40). The initial description of Barton stresses the generic rather than the exceptional, thwarting the superficial desire to read character through appearance. He has a narrow face ‘of no particular complexion’, features of ‘no particular shape’ and an eye of ‘no particular expression’ (15). His nondescript visage is complemented by his ‘unmistakably commonplace’ (36) character, inclining the putative ‘lady reader’ to declare him ‘utterly uninteresting’ (36). Yet it is precisely because everything about him is ‘so very far from remarkable’ (36) that Barton acquires a representative status that warrants attention: it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census, are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. (37) KeywordsNarrow FaceNarrative StrategyNarrative VoiceStrict IntegrityAesthetic TeachingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.