Saint's Everlasting Rest : The Martyrdom of Maggie Tulliver

Abstract

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets. She knew little of saints and martyrs, and had gathered, as a general result of her teaching, that they were a temporary provision against spread of Catholicism and had all died at Smithfield. --George Eliot (The Mill on Floss 286) Most contemporary scholarship on Victorian literature is very much aware of sophisticated understandings--and innovative uses--of genre to be found in these texts, yet importance of hagiography as a rhetorical resource for nineteenth-century writers remains largely unexplored. While it is therefore unsurprising that hagiography should not be included in section devoted to genre in Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (1999), it is nevertheless remarkable that it receives no mention in accounts of Victorian and sage appearing in same volume. Such genres, after all, are undoubtedly related to hagiographic tradition--broadly speaking, writing that represents lives of exceptional figures in order to inspire a similar striving after the highest and best (Eliot, The Mill on Floss 471). Although rhetorical possibilities offered by hagiography as a genre have been masterfully examined by Charles LaPorte in context of Victorian poetry, no similar attempt has been made to theorize relevance of such textual models to major Victorian prose genres--a peculiar oversight, considering more obvious generic resemblances between hagiographic writing and nineteenth-century prose narratives. It is particularly surprising that generic relations between hagiography and nineteenth-century Bildungsroman have not attracted more critical attention, for suggestive parallels exist between these two text-types: both focus on formation of individuals, whose lives are often conceived of in terms of a journey; there is in both kinds of writing an emphasis on interiority of their subjects, and turning points, or moments of revelation, are usually readily identifiable. Structural similarities aside, larger rhetorical functions of two genres are remarkably congruent: hagiographic narratives and novels of development both employ textually-mediated manifestations of personality in order to affirm a particular system of values, and to provide suitable models for emulation. Widely recognized as definitive Bildungsroman, Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1821) gestures to intimate relationship between two genres by means of its very constitution: by embedding Confessions of a Fair Saint within novel, (1) Goethe quite explicitly invites us to explore generic affiliations between hagiography and Bildungsroman. This essay attempts to respond to this invitation by considering George Eliot's engagement with notion of hagiography in The Mill on Floss (1860). To be sure, Eliot's interest in concept of sainthood and hagiography has not gone entirely unnoticed, and several noteworthy studies have registered and elaborated on comparison between Dorothea Brooke and St. Theresa in Middlemarch (1871-72). Robert Damm and Hilary Fraser usefully suggest potential value of studying function of hagiographic discourse in Eliot's writing, but Damm leaves crucial link between sainthood and writing unexplored, while Fraser confines her study to way in which hagiographic references to a particular saint (St. Theresa) contribute to characterization of Dorothea. Building on such studies as Damm's and Fraser's in order to revise limited role that R. J. Schork assigns to hagiography in Eliot's writing, (2) my own essay examines Eliot's sustained meditation in The Mill on Floss on question of what it might mean to construct a saintly life in nineteenth-century England, and proposes that her peculiar Bildungsroman can profitably be read as an exercise in modern hagiography--an attempt to adapt this longstanding tradition of Christian writing for modern, secular ends. …