The traffic in men: female kinship in three novels by George Eliot

Style, Spring, 1998 by Patricia Vigderman

While the traffic in women affirms male power and kinship, this female exchange harbors a subversive gesture on which, paradoxically, the conventional marriage plot depends. In theorizing what she has called "sororophobia," Helena Michie has described this gesture as part of a "submerged counter-narrative - the sister plot - which interacts in complex ways with the dominant romance plot" (50). Looking at how women work out the differences between them, Michie identifies "sexual difference" as "the different positions individual women take up with respect to the sexual" rather than as gender difference (10). She describes Eliot's use of "other" women as part of a narrative strategy that, before it defers to the marriage plot, simply defers it, as a narrative of female sameness and differentiation unfolds (50). As part of her conversation with second-wave feminism, Michie argues for the importance of recognizing sisterhood as a utopian ideal for relations among women, not a given reality. Indeed, she sees Eliot's project in Middlemarch, for example, as one of differentiating a heroine from all other women, and the differences within Dorothea's and Celia's relationship as structuring the larger moral and philosophical issues of the novel.

I would add to Michie's reading the observation that a crucial function of this literal sisterhood is to highlight Dorothea's superiority - which is more and more in evidence as the tension drains from her relationship to Celia. When the sisters are at odds over the jewels at the beginning of the novel, their difference causes them both pain. By the end, Dorothea's calm refusal to tell Celia the story of her romance with Will suggests their sisterhood has lost its emotional resonance. The relatively painless transfer of Sir James's affections from Dorothea to Celia barely ruffled anyone's feelings. As Michie says, another, more "other" woman (Rosamond) is required to dramatize the narrative of female relationship.

Even as she is showing the specialness of her heroine, however, Eliot describes a hidden feminine exchange in which "sexual difference" (as Michie describes it) allows two women to choose each other. Her dark woman and her fair one are each one at the center of her own plot, and each reads the world according to her own quite different lights. When these two lights merge briefly, they radically affect the vision of both women and allow the narrative as a whole to conclude. The medium of these very intense exchanges is in each case a man, for in the separate plots, the handing over of a man from one woman to another resolves the tension. These novels construct a traffic in men, in which the "heroes," in crossing the boundaries between plots, also express the links between women's lives. Although the dominant system is male, the hero's wedding affirms an unexpressed reality; it incorporates an uncelebratable female connection.

The carpenter Adam Bede is a sterling example of English manhood. Tall, dark, and handsome, he is also affectionate, responsible, and upwardly mobile. But, like so many before him, Adam is blind when it comes to women. His heart belongs to the adorable but mini-souled Hetty Sorrel. Hetty's beauty, "like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief" (90), is utterly irresistible: rose-petal cheeks, dimpled lips, long lashes and "dark, delicate rings" of hair - the works. As one might surmise from Eliot's use of slightly malicious baby cliches, this gift of beauty is also a curse, for even Hetty finds her appearance irresistible. Under its influence she drifts within a daydream in which dissipate the social facts of her native Loamshire, the very clay out of which her life is molded. The logic of her vain baby mind tells her that if her feet are so adorable they can transform shoes from clunky to graceful, why shouldn't her innocent, springtime sexuality transform her from a dairymaid into a lady? She has quite captured the fancy of young Arthur Donnithorne, the heir to the local estate, and "he was a great gentleman and could buy everything he liked" (152).