Foremother Poet: George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans Lewes) (1818-80)

In France alone woman has had a vital influence on the development of literature; in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language . . . (George Eliot, “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé”)

George Eliot, 16 March 1877, Sketch by Princess Louise

Dear friends and readers,

I’m yet later this week for my foremother poet posting. Since I’m listening to a splendid reading of the unabridged text of Daniel Deronday by Donada Peters (aka Nadia May, Wanda McCaddon, Ann Miles, Leonarda Stafford) I thought I’d commemorate Mary Ann Evans (pen name: George Eliot) today. I realize from talking to people who love Eliot’s novels and have read all of them, that many people today are unaware she wrote much poetry and some magnificent narratives, not to discount the eloquence, intelligent perception and compassion, wonderful characters, dramatic scenes, description, in short the beauty and poetry of her prose.

Here though I concentrate on Eliot’s verse.

Her Spanish Gypsy, a long dramatic poem (story) was a bigger hit than a couple of her novels (especially Romola, written around the same time) and was reviewed lovingly by Henry James. It’s strongly effective psychological poetry, though the politics are dismayingly reactionary, and the heroine immolates herself (which gives insight into aspects of her novels). Eliot has a sonnet sequence called Brother and Sister (about herself and her brother). There are many poems of the Browning or Tennyson type (monologues, stories) and lots of Martial-like epigrammatic pieces, and lyrics too, the latter mostly (to me) overdone or solemn, arising from Wordsworth and Shelleyan conceptions. Most are too long for me to describe or begin to type out here.

One long dramatic poem titled Armgart was much read and discussed and still is analyzed by critics; it’s about a woman artist whose career is destroyed by a combination of illness and social pressure.

Here is a good passage people often quote from Armgart:

I would rebel and die in twenty worlds
Sooner than bear the yoke of thwarted life,
Each keenest sense turned into keen distaste,
Hunger not satisfied but kept alive
Breathing in languor half a century.
All the world now is but a rack of threads
To twist and dwarf me into pettiness
And basely feigned content, the placid mask
of women’s misery.

Her poetry has been collected; I have a copy of a dissertation that is an edition of the poems. Here I found rows of fragments, little pieces of verse left over as it were, never worked up or placed into a large poem (or as epigraphs to her novels). The reader has to contextualize them him or herself. Here are two:

Suggested by Pindar:

Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life;
And righteous or unrighteous, being done,
They throb in after-throbs till Time himself
Be laid in stillness, and the universe
Quivers and breathes upon no mirror more.

Perhaps about her and Lewes, who was very ill for a long time before he died, and who was her life in effect: he made her writing of her novels possible, he negotiated the contracts which enriched them so they could travel, live well. He supported her very inch of the way lovingly, and she him.

Master in loving! till we met
I lacked the pattern thy sweet love hath set:
I hear Death’s footstep — must we then forget? —
Stay, stay — not yet.

George Henry Lewes, 1876 (see Trollope’s obituary)

This is from her sonnets, Brother and Sister. She had a tortured relationship with her brother (reflected in The Mill on the Floss; she just couldn’t get herself to dismiss his cold malice and rejection of her, and late in life tried to make up with him after she married Cross).

In the first as a generic sister she mourns the loss of her brother’s love and seems to say she placed the very meaning of her existence in her memories and past with him:

VI

Our brown canal was endless to my thought;
And on its banks I sat in dreamy peace,
Unknowing how the good I loved was wrought,
Untroubled by the fear that it would cease.

Slowly the barges floated into view
Rounding a grassy hill to me sublime
With some Unknown beyond it, whither flew
The parting cuckoo toward a fresh spring time.

The wide-arched bridge, the scented elder-flowers,
The wondrous watery rings that died too soon,
The echoes of the quarry, the still hours
With white robe sweeping-on the shadeless noon,

Were but my growing self, are part of me,
My present Past, my root of piety.

In the second you see a woman as a young girl led to worship the male; at the same time there’s a suicidal wish:

VII

THOSE long days measured by my little feet
Had chronicles which yield me many a text;
Where irony still finds an image meet
Of full-grown judgments in this world perplext.

One day my brother left me in high charge,
To mind the rod, while he went seeking bait,
And bade me, when I saw a nearing barge,
Snatch out the line, lest he should come too late.

Proud of the task, I watched with all my might
For one whole minute, till my eyes grew wide,
Till sky and earth took on a strange new light
And seemed a dream-world floating on some tide —

A fair pavilioned boat for me alone
Bearing me onward through the vat unknown.

There is just so much on George Eliot’s life one doesn’t know where to begin. I strongly urge though beginning with Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s The Real Life of Maryann Evans, based as it is thoroughly on Eliot’s texts, especially her wonderful letters; Peggy Fitzhugh Johnston’s The Transformation of Rage is also very good. I find Ashton a normalizer and basically she just gives a redo of Gordon Haight. Also very good are the books by Jennifer Uglow, Gillian Beer and William Baker. The edition of poems I spoke of is a Cornell dissertation by Cynthia Ann Secor, and I wouldn’t miss Eliot’s brilliant essays, especially the one called “Wonen in France” (a review of a book of letters in the 17th century) where she for once talks about the birth of feminism in literature and situates in the later 17th century in France (from which I took my opening quotation). Her “Silly Lady Novelists’ shows her anti-feminism side and is unfortunately endlessly reprinted; there are countless silly male novelists who should be equally skewed.

I include here a passage from an essay I published partly on George Eliot in Studies in the Novel, “Taking Sides” (it includes a bibliography for Eliot):

A close reading of Eliot’s novels in the context of her autobiographical writing and non-fiction suggested to me that for the most part George Eliot’s politics is voiced in a language of painful personal experience. Her last book, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, includes rare instances of outright political language. There she dismisses an ideal of “common humanity” as hopelessly elitist “cosmopolitanism” or “universal alienism.” She argues that individuals cannot identify with one another as simply as people: nationalism is not a social construction; anyone who thinks differently is a blind idealist. Her assumption is that the only way to achieve toleration for any group of people is to give them power over themselves and other groups of people or equal power with other groups in a specific area (Theophrastus Such 146-49, 165). In Eliot’s stories her intelligent and sensitive heroes and heroines are thwarted and punished, and are made to submit to the desires of dense and passionate characters who far from earning any right to ask for submission, have maimed and will probably continue to maim these heroes and heroines because she despaired of finding any other way for them to achieve a peaceful integration into an ordered world. In her fiction, she articulates this idea in words which show she came to it through giving in to painful imperceptive pressure, and she urges the reader to see this kind of pressure as rooted in irremediable weakness which moral strength should yield to:

The stronger will always rule, say some, with an air of confidence which is like a lawyer’s flourish, forbidding exceptions or additions. But what is strength? Is it blind wilfulness that sees no terrors, no many-linked consequences, no bruises and wounds of those whose cords it tightens? Is it the narrowness of brain that conceives no needs differing from its own, and looks to no results beyond the bargains of to-day; that tugs with emphasis for every small purpose, and thinks it weakness to exercise the sublime power of resolved renunciation? There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness (Felix Holt 78).

Eliot’s stories are shaped to show that characters who subject themselves to others by overriding vitally-felt obligations to themselves or others also get something of pragmatic value in return. The rewards include gratification because the group professes admiration and respect for the individual, a highly compromised or grudging and grateful love, and safety (Middlemarch 586-87, 664-66; “The Antigone and Its Moral,” Byatt and Warren 365-66).

It is the great merit of Eliot’s imaginative work that she poses questions of serious and large import with which we are today only beginning to deal frankly. It may be its great defect that she repeatedly opts for dramatic resolutions which cruelly deprive her exemplary characters of some natural fulfillment or worthy goal on the grounds that it is right for them to violate their instincts. However, when she does this she provides an earnest agonized record of what was lost: Daniel Deronda’s mother unrepentantly puts before her son how her father egoistically used the patriarchical norms for a mother and daughter to pervert humane obligations between individuals and to repress her talents and nature as an individual (e.g., Daniel Deronda 535-48;Wilt).

It is true that Eliot’s stories occasionally end shockingly with an immolation of what is estimable, humane, and productive of genuinely beneficial decency, sometimes on behalf of an egoistic illusory tribal nationalism (The Spanish Gypsy). The Mill on the Floss ends on Maggie’s semi-suicidal act on behalf of a brother who has throughout the novel been as repugnant, narrow-minded, and vindictive as she has been pleasing, open-minded, and forgiving.8 More frequently, though, her endings are consolatory. At long last her characters find themselves in, or create a situation where one of them or the situation itself permits a dramatic resolution which defies the materialism, genetic tribalism, and the sheer cruelty and stupidity of unjust social arrangements rooted in human nature. The close of Silas Marner gives us a young girl who refuses to leave the old man who has brought her up and invested everything he valued in himself in her, not on the grounds that she would feel uncomfortable in upper class society (as the BBC/A&E/WGBH 1995 film adaptation of Silas Marner would have it), but on the grounds that her biological father has forfeited his rights over her.

In one of Eliot’s letters she writes:

I cannot tell you how much melancholy it causes me that people are, for the most part, so incapable of comprehending the state of mind which cares for that which is essentially human in all forms of belief, and desires to exhibit it under all forms of loving truthfulness … the only affect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but in the broad fact of being human (Haight, George Eliot Letters 3:111, 5 July 1859).

Eliot infuses her pictures of earlier eras with nostalgia; painstaking research mitigates the idealization. The goal seems to induce a belief in a time and place when individual acts had significance. Her choice of historical fiction seems rooted in her religious sensibility (Anger).

Eliot’s novels powerfully focus on characters who have lived apart, for whom isolation produces severe mental distress and destructive behavior. Her later novels are prophetic because she lived and wrote as a displaced alienated woman who lovingly narrated her experience and that of others with absolute earnest literal truthfulness “as if I were in a witness- box . . . on oath” (Adam Bede 177). Her complicity is expiatory propitiation. To close ourselves off from her torment is to close ourselves off from that of other women writers whose work hers resembles (and who have been castigated similarly). George Eliot’s past is not another country.

I close with a deliberately provocative passage from A.S. Byatt’s Whistling woman (now A. S. Byatt is much indebted to Eliot, herself a pastiche novelist of power in her Possession):

“”Eliot punished her beautiful characters, Julia said. No, said Frederica, she punished those who exploited it, who lived by it. Hetty, cold Rosamund, chilly, terrified, power-crazed Gwendolen. Her warm-blooded heroines were beautiful too. Dorothea, Maggie. But they wanted something else out of life beside sex and marriage, and sex and marriage defeated them. She punished them, said Julia. She punished Dorothea for high mindedness and Maggie for throbbing with emotion. She made Dorothea decline into marriage with a second-rate journalist, and punished Maggie for sex, with drowning. She couldn’t make a model of a woman who could be free, and creative, and sexy. She couldn’t give her readers any hope.

‘She was free and creative and sexy’, said Frederica. ‘She must have been the most public adulteress in England, and in the end Queen Victoria commissioned a series of paintings from her books and they tried to bury her in the Abbey’.

‘She had no children’, said Penny. ‘She knew about contraception, sponges and vinegar.

‘She looked after GH Lewes’s sons’, said Frederica. ‘She earned their school fees’.

‘Like a man,’ said Julia. ‘she earned money. Like a man.’

‘She couldn’t let Dorothea found a universiity, or Maggie write a book’, said Frederica. ‘She was telling it how it was. How clever women’s lives were’.”

Ellen