Eliot's Angels

Entranced by the lyricism and intensity of George Eliot’s Adam Bede the first time I read it, I found the character Dinah strangely weakened as she sought to convert Hetty, condemned for murder. I began to look back through the book for the meaning of this. George Eliot had been exquisitely rich in her descriptions of farm and dairy, country dance and kitchen work, carpentry shop and drawing-room. Moreover, she had shown sharp, witty insight into the subtle ways people persuade themselves they are doing no harm, or neglect their duties, or miss saying the very thing or seeing the very thing that would join heart to heart. She had been so clear about dynamics in a family devastated by alcohol, so measured in her attention to detail in every least leaf, every gesture that would enrich meaning, that I knew the lapse must be deliberate. And so it was. The narrator intruded with little flurries of explanation at key moments, as if there were something readers should fear about Dinah's Methodism. Puzzled, I investigated early Methodism, but soon realized that was not the source of the strange tension tugging at the story.

Meanwhile, my old friendship with Rene Girard was enlivening a sabbatical at Stanford. As I joined his fortnightly salon, the patterns of behavior described in the mimetic theory began to illuminate Eliot's novels, and the relationships of the novels to the intellectual ferment in which they were written. I increasingly focused my presentations for the Colloquium on Eliot's novels. Besides Girard himself, Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Gil Baillie, Paul Caringella, Randy Coleman-Reese William Hurlbut, Mary Ann Eller and Martin Ford were among the more helpful interlocutors.

A presentation on Daniel Deronda for the Colloquium on Violence and Religion demanded attention to Eliot's biography. The many studies of her life scarcely touched upon the dissonances I had detected; mostly they joined a choir invisible, praising not only her wisdom about human relations and her skill at creating immersive settings, but also her intellectual integrity, her progressive thought, her feminist boldness, and her courage in the face of convention. Her brother's malice had been her great heartbreak; the loyal, loving hero who had awakened her talent and manifested her to the world was her longtime lover, George Henry Lewes.

Except for some of the incidents and locations described in her novels, the heroine of the biographies seemed scarcely connected to voice of her fiction. There was a near-universal presumption in the criticism that humanism was the creed of any intelligent person, and that Christianity was something that had been left behind--rather an embarrassment. This attitude was perhaps consonant with an argumentative strain in her novels, but it did not accurately reflect the conditions of their composition. These were not documents of triumph. Eliot had broken away from her cultural background with resentment and with anguish; the ambivalence pervades her novels. I first detected it in Adam Bede, but it was nowhere to be completely escaped; the Colloquium alerted me to the mimetic dimensions of this cultural tension in itself.