A modern odyssey: Realism, the masses, and nationalism in George Eliot's Felix Holt

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1996 by Lesjak, Carolyn

Yet Eliot does attempt to narrate a form of labor complementary to her mobilization of culture. To do so she must turn back to the past. In an attempt to reconnect figuratively the brain and the hands, to offer an alternative to the nonrepresentability of the hands alone, Eliot leaves the domain of the industrialized working class and returns to the residual socio-economic mode of artisanal production. Mental and manual labor are combined in the figure of Felix Holt as artisan and organic intellectual. This return can be read generally as a desire to maintain social positions that are the creation of obsolete modes of production (see Marx 399-421). And, within the context of the novel, it serves to carve out an extra-economic realm seemingly independent of industrial production.

The strangeness of Felix's socio-economic markings are acknowledged in the text: "Felix was known personally, and vaguely believed to be a man who meant many queer things, not at all of an every-day kind" (427). Part of this "queerness" results from Felix's marginal position outside the economy of exchange: "He had put a stop to the making of saleable drugs, contrary to the nature of buying and selling" (465, emphasis added). From his newly created role as lower-middleclass artisan, Felix putatively escapes the snares of modernization-market relations and the instrumentality they express. On the one hand, there is a utopian element in Eliot's move back to quasi-artisanal production; a desire somehow to reestablish the fast-disappearing connection between manual and mental labor, to slow down the pace of change and resist the fragmentation threatening the cohesiveness of the rural community. Herein lies the creative performative capacity utterly denied the industrial worker. On the other hand, caught as he is in an historically outmoded economic structure and cultural form, Felix represents a regressive resistance to "modernity" itself. Like Eliot's disembodied notion of culture, he is literally "not at all of an every-day kind" (428).

In essence, the narrative's investment in him lies in the contrast he provides to the modern worker. As the fictive author of the "Address to Working Men" he advises the workers to recognize the organic, evolutionary nature of things, and therefore to "take the world as it is"; to accept the superiority of the "masters" who hold the keys to this cultural treasure, which is "the life of the nation" (62122). In this sense, Felix Holt hovers didactically over the text as a model-of resistance to the penetration of capital and of acquiescence to a politics of class conciliation premised on a unifying vision of cultural nationalism. To expose the ideologies and discourses of modern nationalism and its construction within bourgeois culture is to discover the traces of the repressed history contained in (the absence of) industrial labor.

Love's Labors

Just as the division between work and culture presupposed a reconfiguration of the relation between external and internal (the workers, potentially external forces of disruption, are "internalized" within the boundaries of English culture), the relation of England to its other "Others"-the Orientalized East-operates through the construction of internal/external boundaries of mutual exclusivity. The Orient enters Felix Holt in the guise of Harold Transome, who arrives back on England's shores at the beginning of the novel. We learn little about Harold's exploits while he has been away in Greece save for the fact that he has accumulated large sums of money and an heir. While the actual source of Harold's money is left unspecified, we do know that his experience abroad has reshaped his views on the processes of modernization at home. The apparent (and grossly stereotypical) slothfulness of the Easterner serves to justify conveniently the selfinterested practices of competitive English commerce: