Eliot live -- The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction by Rosemarie Bodenheimer

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1995 by Shires, Linda M

ROSEMARIE BODENHEIMER, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 295, $33.95.

Reviewers don't usually attend first to marketing; however, for a book concerning tensions among self-presentation, self-concealments, profession, vocation, and market, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans seems to me too restrained in its claims for itself. It is more than a model of how to read letters beside fiction and more than a major biography of George Eliot. This book should be valuable to readers other than scholars of Eliot or devourers of literary biographies.

The book centrally concerns representations of a complex life and well-known texts, Eliot's controlling relationship to her audiences, and her ambitions for and anxieties about reputation and fame. Instead of reading letters as data sources or as generically related to conversation, however, Rosemarie Bodenheimer takes them as written documents, each defined by the presence of a particular audience and thus each as an act of self-representation. Although she does not say so, this strategy is particularly important for handling nineteenth-century letters, because they were written during a phase of capitalism when the issue of privacy and the nature of public imagery, in both its senses of spectacle and publicity, were undergoing continuous redefinition. Bodenheimer's book thus stands out markedly from the other two most important biographies of Eliot, that of Gordon Haight, who clearly distinguishes between life and art, and privileges the first, and that of Ruby Redinger, who relies on psychoanalysis to show how Eliot's art responds to deeply-felt childhood losses.

That Bodenheimer reads and selects letters astutely, is deeply and widely read in all of Eliot's work and scholarship on that work, and remains keenly sensitive to rhetorical strategies of self-presentation marks the book as an especially valuable one to Eliot studies. Contrary to its title, which touts the revelation of a "real" life versus some other kind of life, Bodenheimer does not rely on simplistic binaries. Indeed, her elegant documenting of the "reactions and counterreactions" of Eliot's "emotional economy" (266) matches Eliot's own finely-tuned treatment of her fictional characters. Bodenheimer Mousses to rest with any one explanation or to judge without taking account of a variety of perspectives. She is no Casaubon. Indeed, if there is a "key" to Eliot, her life, and work, it is to be found in the various voices of "Theophrastus Such" or, more pointedly, in the four passionate and argumentative voices, two female, two male, of the poem "Armgart" in which there is no explaining or moralizing narrator to help us interpret experience at all. Eliot might have wished to write a "true representation," and the title of this book might trumpet a "real life," but both authors know the impossibility of such constructs.

Unlike many biographers, Bodenheimer views life capaciously--not in terms of a secret, a trauma, a turning point, or a teleology. The great strength of the book, as both Eliot criticism and as biography, lies in its individual analyses of critical junctures in Eliot's life and career--moments of choice, of crisis, of change, and of seeking. These complicated junctures include, for instance, the well-known "holy war" with her father about religion and her choice of going to the continent with George Henry Lewes. However, Bodenheimer also treats junctures other critics have ignored or downplayed. She isolates Eliot's step parenting and her cultivation of a particular image with a group of young worshippers in her last decade of life as significant.

As part of her discussion of such complex moments, Bodenheimer weaves in analysis of the novels, novellas, and poems. Sometimes she handles these texts as analogues to the letters; at other times she treats them at length. For example, she analyzes the issue of performance in Daniel Deronda or self-torment and ambition in The Mill on the Floss. In one of the most interesting chapters, which compares Eliot's early letters to those of Charlotte Brontes, Bodenheimer illustrates Eliot's constant battle between a tormenting self-scrutiny and an embarrassingly hungry ambition for fame. She demonstrates by example how very often Eliot's self-criticism or discouragement gets transmuted, through writing, into energy and self-creation. She is able to explain in great detail how Eliot's restraint and apology are opportunities for displays of self-delighting, if embarrassing, narrative and social power. And she is particularly astute on the "dense and muscular demand of her prose, and its peculiar self-enclosure" (39). She explains the double activity of Eliot's writing in which she responds "to the imaginative opposition that she herself creates" (46). It is a movement of narrative which re-reads the past, responds to implications of that past, and readies itself for a potential future.

Bodenheimer also shows, as no one else has done, the complexity of the anxieties besetting Eliot, who claims a vocation, practices a profession, and worries constantly about the value and influence of her writing. Thus Bodenheimer not only indicates how the stresses of ambition, professionalism, and physical/mental torment get played out in the letters, fiction, and poetry, she also contextualizes them historically and emotionally in terms of Eliot's evangelical training, her exposure to contemporary conduct books, her family relations, and her involvement with the production of her texts. Eliot's plans with Lewes and Blackwood to publish Middlemarch in eight separate parts, for instance, would affect sales, image, and the reception of text and writer. Bodenheimer handles this imbrication of the material and the symbolic well, whereas most critics of marketplace issues choose one or the other on which to focus because of the enormous difficulty of treating them at the same time.