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A modern odyssey: Realism, the masses, and nationalism in George Eliot's Felix Holt
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1996 by Lesjak, Carolyn
Eliot does, however, in a sense flesh out the barren O! of this future, of how it might be experienced, by telling us what it will not be, by showing us what the coach journey is and what it offers. Taking us alone with her on a hypothetical trip from Avon to Kent, Eliot gives us a vision of the English countryside verdant with over-blossoming nature and a pace of life consonant with the rhythms of rural existence; the shepherd here moves in sync with the slow pace of his grazing cattle. Twined and tendrilled with wild convolvulus, many-tubed honeysuckle, scarlet haws, deep-crimson hips, blackberry branches, pale pink dogroses, and ruby-berried nightshade, it is a landscape demarcated by the "unmarketable beauty" of traditional English hedgerows (77). Were we to catch a glimpse of the people contentedly ensconced behind these hedgerows, we would see faces begrimed with dirt; yet, lest we mistakenly confer upon this dirt a lack of moral uprightness, of wanton uncleanliness, Eliot is quick to inform us that this is not your ordinary dirt but Protestant dirt, the kind of dirt that makes its possessors clean. And these Protestants in particular are doubly scrubbed, saved as they are "from the excesses of Protestantism by not knowing how to read" (77). These are the glory days: the days before the rick-burners, the riots, and the encroachment of handlooms and mines-and with them Dissenters-on this pastoral cornucopia.
As the coach continues on its way, however, this scene passes, and we near the villages and hamlets with their coal-pits and manufacture. At this juncture, a schism is registered. Whereas those inhabitants peopling the rural countryside are "sure that old England was the best of all possible countries" (78) this manufacturing midlands' population is not so easily convinced. Indeed, the connection between the town and the country becomes hard if not impossible to discern; the traveler has literally passed from "one phase of English life to another" (79)where dirt is no longer imbued with any great moral rectitude but is simply dirty. In this new landscape, it becomes difficult to read the signs so transparent in the agricultural regions. Whereas rural life apparently hides nothing valuable beneath its tendrils-"If there were any facts which had not fallen under their own observation, they were facts not worth observing" (78)-such transparency between vision and object becomes unsettled and disrupted once we enter the new landscape of the town. Representation itself becomes indeterminate, precariously and dangerously up for grabs by a variety of different and contradictory interpretations. Here the parson preaches a sermon invoking his parishioners to "plough up the fallow-ground of your hearts" (80) and its meaning is so opaque, so susceptible to being divergently interpreted that one group sees in it an argument for fallows and yet another sees it, au contraire, as an argument against them. Shaken by this highly unstable state of affairs, the parson simply expires in a fit of apoplexy.
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