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

Style, Spring, 1998 by Patricia Vigderman

Like Dinah, Dorothea has been imprisoned in her own sense that she is living for others. After their encounters with Hetty and Rosamond, both these "good" women are changed, now able to perceive and to honor their own desires. The outward shape of the cross-class, cross-plot, cross-virtue exchange is the body of the man. Unlike the negotiations of male power relationships that Sedgwick describes, this triangular traffic in men is not based on economic or political rights. Instead, by cutting through cultural rites in which baubles, babble, and silly novels trivialize women's deepest feelings, it both acknowledges mutual need and allows an intense same-sex bonding as its (albeit displaced) sexual expression.

The scenes between Hetty and Dinah, Dorothea and Rosamond are great scenes of human compassion and contact.'(3) While they make way for the romantic denouements, the conversions of Rosamond and Hetty are very much at the heart of the novels. Their intensity is not equaled elsewhere in either one; the happy endings merely return everybody to his or her proper place: Adam's slow perception of his love for Dinah comes under prodding from his busybody mother Lisbeth, who is dying to get Dinah for a daughter-in-law (Eve Sedgwick notes that by the end of the novel Dinah has in fact become Lisbeth); when Will and Dorothea finally plight their troth they become, as Margaret Humans has pointed out, a pair of innocent children (150). Beneath the comic resolution of Dinah's and Dorothea's stories, however, lies the unresolved tragedy in Hetty's and Rosamond's. This tragedy becomes fully developed in Daniel Deronda, Eliot's last novel, where the traffic in men that leads to marriage is overshadowed by a negotiation of sexual difference in which a woman tries to save, to convert, herself.

In Daniel Deronda a traffic in men takes place three times. Most similar to the pattern in the other books is Gwendolen Harleth's yielding of Daniel to the woman he actually loves, Mirah Cohen. Then, there is a negative traffic, in which the flesh of Henleigh Grandcourt expresses a dreadful communality between Gwendolen and Lydia Glasher. Lastly, and most subversively, there is an intrapsychic traffic between Gwendolen and Daniel in which Gwendolen ends up with rights to herself, however inconclusive these may be.

Gwendolen Harleth's story, like Dorothea's, begins with a comment on her beauty intended to describe as well her very problematic spiritual state. Watching her at the gambling table of a European spa, Daniel cannot decide if she is beautiful or not. Comments by other onlookers suggest a shakiness about her, a tinge of evil: "She has got herself up as a sort of serpent now" (7), says one member of a group seated near her in the casino. Far from resembling the Blessed Virgin, Gwendolen is an Eve who shows her relationship to her tempter. Her stylish looks do not pretend to innocence. Brought up in hotels and various rented and borrowed accommodations, Gwendolen has a sophisticated freedom from local constraints that makes her ominously rootless. "A human life," says the narrator, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth . . . a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. . . .