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

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

progress, of "laws" of evolution and organic growth that displace human agency as the motor of change (Williams, Problems 213-39; Brantlinger).13 These two phases are divided along class lines. Whereas the first Reform Bill centered on the issue of enfranchising the middle class, with the 1867 Bill the middle class found itself in a decidedly different position, possibly having to cede rather than gain power through the extension of the franchise to the working class. With the middle class in a position potentially to lose power, the political ground of reform radically shifted; the hegemony of the middle class was threatened. At this point broad issues of culture began to play a significantly larger part in English political life. Culture and its related terms-education, responsibility, moral and intellectual fitness, obligation, trust and so on-slowly came to displace questions of natural right; these cultural criteria took precedence over what properly constituted an individual's right to representation.ll Or, as Brantlinger notes, "one stood for or against a new reform bill, depending partly on one's definition of culture and on one's belief as to whether those who were to be enfranchised had enough of it or not" (239).

Curiously enough, it is this latter phase of reform that Felix Holt narrates. As the pub scenes illustrate, what is of central concern is whether the workers have the cultural capital to warrant a political right to representation. And if the caricature of their political and intellectual ineptitude were not evidence enough, the depiction of their mob violence on election day resulting, as it does, in an anarchic, seemingly politically unmotivated riot, definitively answers this concern with a resounding no.lS Thus, while Felix Holt is set in the period of crisis of the first Reform Bill of 1832, ideationally the crisis it confronts and attempts to reconcile is that of the second Reform Bill, contemporaneous with the actual period in which Eliot was writing the novel. In the narrative's own practice, then, the present is not written as a continuation of the past but rather is projected back onto the past. The collapse of present into past conflates two distinct historical moments into one moment, a moment, moreover, that as the result of the fusion must always remain an ideal.

This metaleptic return has direct consequences for Eliot's representations of work. Since the ultimate basis for political judgment rests on cultural capital, neither work nor the workplace are necessary sites for political claims to representation. Production is repressed, excluded from the status of reality. In a sense, then, it becomes not so much a question of being unable to represent work but of its seeming irrelevance to the "present" 1860s politics of culture. In the process, thirty-odd years of history are conflated, years that include, significantly, the working-class militancy of the 1840s when, from a middle-class British perspective, workers' struggle in the political form of Chartism reared its ugly head and threatened to divide the nation along class lines. The active forgetting of that which has not yet happened-given the historical setting of Felix Holt-eliminates with it the memory of class conflict.