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

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

It is precisely this attempt to purge the past of its fractious discontinuities that is necessary to constitute the nation. It is the absent space of work which will be filled by the concept of "nation," which, unlike work, serves to unite the heterogeneous workers and middle-class citizens populating Felix Holt. In essence, the "Condition of England" question is "answered" through its supersession by culture: the nation becomes synonymous with culture, English culture, which in turn provides the ideological cement necessary to symbolically unite worker and capitalist in their mutual national identification as English.'6 Much like our coachman, whose narrative was temporarily derailed by the penetration of urban capital (manifest in the railroad) into the countryside, the narrative of Felix Holt, faced with the presence of industrial labor, shifts gears, moving into a prophetic register which foretells the steady, progressive realization of a national destiny.

A second look at Mr. Johnson's speech bears out this shift in political terrain. Framed by an unquestioned belief in history as progress-"as this country prospers," he begins-Johnson's speech mirrors the movement of reform just described, and diverts attention from labor politics per se to a national politics: "the country will prosper... will rise to the tip-top of everything." As the future tense of his discourse appropriately emphasizes, he moves here into the prophetic mode, virtually prophesying the nation and its fortunes. This prophetic mode, as with the coachman, leaves the realm of descriptive, realistic narrative, and indeed must: the prophetic therefore constructs a political space divorced from political action and devoid of those very real conflicts which would hamper national unity. The only form of action entertained is the workers' rioting which results from a misguided and wholly unpolitical mob mentality, a mentality, it is underscored, "animated by no real political passion" (428). To the extent that the workers are thus reduced to a "mad crowd" (425), their collective subjectivity is limited to passive receivership (possibly) of England's great cultural heritage. In Arnoldian fashion, culture and its expression in the "nation" come to stand virtually in opposition to history: like Arnold's understanding of "anarchy,"

history within Felix Holt is too embedded in the thick of things, too susceptible to divisions of class and ideology. Reaching across this divide, culture functions as a protective enclosure, a space where the social practices of labor are suspended. Within the weave of culture, the fabric of social relations in modern society and the abstract form of social domination intrinsic to them are severed from their socio-historical constitution in determinate, structured forms of practice.

The politics of culture in which Felix Holt is engaged, as discussed above, more properly represent the period of reform of the 1860s following the Chartist struggles of the 1840s, a period which contains within it the defeat of the first wave of working-class militancy: action on the workers' part has already been effectively quelled and overcome. When attempting to confront industrial labor, then, the narrative shifts into a register that already precludes it from social consideration. Within the text, Chartism and the alternative vision of work it carries with it is represented as an historical impossibility-though ostensibly the novel is fictively situated in 1832.