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

In the following reading of George Eliot's Felix Holt, I will argue that this process occurs through a series of displacements involving ever-wider spheres: from production to the domestic sphere of consumption, from the domestic sphere to the national sphere, and finally from the national to the imperial sphere, with each move entailing a symbolic resolution of conflict.6 A central precondition for this symbolic resolution of conflict is the exclusion of work and working-class struggle from representation; an exclusion prompted, on the one hand, by the very real demands being made by the English working class for political representation and, on the other hand, naturalized almost seamlessly by a politics of culture which shifts the terms of political representation away from the productive sphere altogether. In order to mute class conflict and the disparities of wealth which divide the productive sphere, the working class is represented in the pub or the home thereby allowing it to be defined in terms of its pleasures as opposed to its productive activity. A "crime" committed by an individual member of the working class-be it theft, murder, or some act of violence-functions initially to rob working-class voices of their political legitimacy. This shift in narrative focus provides the space necessary for the construction of a "moral community," independent of industrial production. In the end, a sense of community united under the concept of "nation" is cemented against what are perceived of as both the external and internal forces threatening its dissolution.

The Prophetic vs. The Narrative

George Eliot's Felix Holt promises perhaps too much. Beginning in the memorable year 1832, it immodestly sets as its task the tracing of change in the English industrial landscape and the effects of this change on the fictional town of Treby Magna. The opening passage takes us back in time to the period immediately preceding the novel's setting, when "the glory had not yet departed from the old coach-roads" (75). Eliot compares the sights, sounds, and fullness of immediately apprehensible experience offered by the long, slow journey by coach to a future where travel will more likely resemble a "bullet" being "shot ... through a tube." Speed becomes the new determining force; that which will alter not only the landscape but our ability to relate to it as well.7 For Eliot, the high-speed "tubejourney's" limitations are twofold. First, it is disruptive to memory. Second, and perhaps most importantly for the task at hand, it defies representation: "The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as barren as an exclamatory O!" (75). Such a crisis of representation would seem to put Eliot's own role as writer in danger, if indeed she is to relate to us the changes in Treby Magna effected by industrialization. By setting the novel in 1832, however (although it was written in 1866), Eliot seems to want to avoid this representational impasse. By returning to this earlier period she will describe the process of this change, but not the experiences of it which are yet to come, foreseeable yet unrepresentable some time in the still indefinite future (which was actually Eliot's own present).8