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

All this is not to say that we should relish the sentimental strains of Mary Barton or any other industrial novel. Instead, it is to point out the particular representational quandary in which many critics, following the lead of Williams, have placed the industrial novel. On the one hand, these novels cannot be "great" literature if and when they stray from their mission of authenticity, which, needless to say, they always do. And, when they do stray into the realm of properly domestic fiction, they certainly cannot be considered great because sentimental fiction (obviously?) is of no "lasting interest." On the face of it, such a division falsely implies that domestic fiction deals exclusively with the domestic sphere whereas industrial fiction has as its singular domain the public sphere.2

In addition to this sort of exclusion of the domestic from the public sphere, there is another exclusion which operates with a certain specificity to the industrial novel, given its project, broadly defined, of representing industrialization and its social effects. This exclusion is one in which the notion of "culture" (here inclusive of more than simply literary culture) is used as an ideological weapon to exclude the realm of production from the bourgeois public sphere.3 That is, culture becomes part of the bourgeois public sphere's arsenal of exclusions and disavowals; through the ideology of culture, the producers of England's wealth are barred from participation and inclusion in the public sphere because they are deemed deficient in cultural capital. Culture becomes a litmus test for workers being admitted into the public sphere. Thus, the same notion of Arnoldian culture which has worked to situate the industrial novel outside of the literary canon, also serves to exclude the sphere of production from the public sphereboth in the industrial novel and in Victorian society itself.4

Paradoxically, while Williams's body of work emphasizes the need to theorize culture not, as Arnold does, as something discrete and autonomous but rather as integral to all social practices, for the most part he leaves out the cultural formation of imperialism and its determining effects upon England and English culture. As I will argue, however, the crisis of industrialism, the industrial novel's raison d'etre, and its connected attempt to understand the newly-emerging experience and processes of modernity, cannot be understood outside the context of English nationalism and Empire. It is here that the exoticism of the Goncourts is more generally applicable. If we read the industrial novel as a narrative of "internal" travel, with its respective authors operating as adventure-seeking travelers of sorts, the masses, through metaphoric displacement, are situated much like the exotic, colonial Other, but with the added thrust that their threat to England is if anything greater than that of the colonial, existing as it does within the internal, domestic boundaries of England.5 Faced with the cultural anxiety wrought by the possibility of internal disruption and division, the industrial novel emplots a paradigmatic structure wherein the attempt to represent the fearfully internal Other-the working class-necessitates its eventual absorption into a new community, one whose membership admits an identification beyond that of class interest, in place of class distinctions; that is, the unifying ideology of the national body. The cementing of this national ideology is predicated on the erasure of class and gender inequalities. Or, as Benedict Anderson has formulated it, "regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in the imagined community of 'nation,' the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship" (7, emphasis added).