Avrom Fleishman - George Eliots Intellectual Life

Avrom Fleishman

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What to call her? The subject of this study changed her name repeatedly during her life, but I shall refer to her throughout as George Eliot, not only for convenience but on a psychological premiss. While modifying her social identity by renaming, she was continuously creating an intellectual identity. George Eliot names this evolving self-creation.

This developmental view of Eliot avoids thinking of her as permanently attached to any ideology or definitively influenced by any other thinker. As with all great writers, her mind was marked by independence, a synthetic tendency, and broad sympathy.

A few words on method. My preparation for writing this study involved reading (or reading in) what George Eliot read. As a teacher of mine once remarked, she read everything and what she didnt read, Lewes read. So I havent read every word she read; considering the dross she had to review, its not certain that she read every word either. My aim in serving as an intellectual historian has been somewhat different from that of my training as a literary critic. It is the Collingwoodian one, to recreate in my own understanding the mind of the historical subject, to grasp the motivation, content and action of that mind in her writing, both fictional and non-fictional. This is, of course, an unattainable goal, not the less worth striving for. A related methodological concern has been to make it difficult for the reader to discern where I agree or disagree with Eliots ideas. In this aim, too, I have probably not succeeded.

Eliots novels will be considered here not as works of art but as moments for the emergence of ideas. This is obviously an artificial distinction, for artistic constructs are ideas, too. Yet it should be possible to discuss distinct elements of an artwork without undertaking the task of literary criticism, the explication of whole works. The theoretical challenges of my approach lie within the sphere of the history of ideas, rather than in literary criticism, which has its own theoretical problems. There are roughly three approaches to ideas in fiction: an author believed certain things and here they are in the novel or poem the insertive approach; here is an idea in a novel or poem, and the author must have believed it the extractive approach; and, here is how an idea works in the course of a novel or poem the functional approach. I have looked for opportunities to discuss active ideas in Eliots fiction, just as my reading of her non-fictional writings stresses the dynamic element in her thinking.

There have been numerous studies of Eliots ideas. To recall only book-length, and highly rewarding, works: Pierre Bourlhonnes George Eliot: Essai de biographie intellectuelle et morale (1933); Michael Wolffs unpublished dissertation, Marian Evans to George Eliot: The Moral and Intellectual Foundations of Her Career (1958); Bernard J. Pariss Experiments in Life: George Eliots Quest for Values (1965); William Myerss The Teaching of George Eliot (1984); and Valerie Dodds George Eliot: An Intellectual Life (1990). The common goal of their efforts has been summation: to assemble a coherent order of Eliots ideas so as to present her mind as an accomplished a highly accomplished structure. I have chosen to present it as a work in progress, emphasizing not merely its transitional but its progressive character. Just as as shall emerge in what follows Eliots fiction traces the progress of her heroes and heroines toward more adequate ways of conducting their lives, just as it shall also be maintained her main philosophic affinities were to theories of past and potential human advancement, so in her own life she lived out the extended drama of intellectual challenge and response.

By looking at matters from a slightly different angle, one sees or thinks one sees some different things, or the same ones differently. By taking the tack mentioned above, I have come to believe a number of things about Eliots mind that are not in the current repertoire of received ideas of the subject. As suggested above, she emerges as a progressive though not a liberal, in either the Victorian or current senses of the term who believed in the possibility and reality of improvement in the social and personal spheres. (I shall shortly qualify this claim.) She was closer to John Stuart Mills version of progress, as is manifested by her consistent and appreciative reading of the great liberals works as they appeared, than to Auguste Comtes, which she read scantily, and with increasing chagrin as his authoritarian tendencies emerged. She was receptive to and even a passing participant in the growth of scientific discovery, closely supportive of her common-law husbands career change in this direction, and not a skeptic of scientific truth, as maintained by recent critics. She was a humanist, to use the term for a loose association of thinkers that emerged in the nineteenth century, deriving a set of ethical values from a tradition broader than the Judeo-Christian one alone. And she was tragically idealistic, if one may coin a phrase, believing both in the awesome spirituality of human aspirations toward the higher life and in the ultimate inefficacy of all attempts to realize the ideal. (As a footnote: I make a distinction between idealist and idealistic the former referring to a distinct philosophic position, the latter to a broader orientation, for which progressive, meliorist and visionary are at times useful equivalents.) If these be heresies, I shall try to make the most of them.