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George Eliot and the production of consumers
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Winter 1997 by Leah Price
Dicey turns Eliot's organicist model of art against her. For Dowden's reluctance to "detach" beauties and the Westminster's refusal to "withdraw them from their context," he substitutes the accusation that the beauty of the sayings deprives Middlemarch itself of unity to begin with: The parts are much more striking than the whole.... No one who admires beautiful writing or who can appreciate striking and original thoughts can fail to feel that the chorus or reflective portion of the book is full of beauty and power. To a large class of persons it forms probably the great charm of Middlemarch.... But a critic, even while he admires the reflections themselves ... can hardly deny that the part taken by George Eliot as the moralizer over her own handiwork, if it gives her novel a peculiar charm, also greatly damages its whole effect.... The very brilliancy of the epigrams,... the elaborate care given to the separate parts, leaves in the mind a sense of something like strain, and makes it difficult to look at the work as a whole. (351) That "large class of persons" is embodied by Main and his readers; but as "a critic," Dicey excludes himself from it. So does the reviewer who complains that the Scenes of Clerical Life contain too many beauties: "Almost every sentence seems finished into an epigram or an aphorism. The pudding is often too profuse in plums-too scanty in connective dough" (Rev. of Scenes 567). Where Main's preface praises Eliot's sayings as "riches," the review suggests that their richness makes the novels indigestible. The metaphor neatly reverses the traditional comparison of fiction with sweetmeats and instruction with plain food. Earlier critics of the novel conventionally argue that-as one reviewer puts it in 1812-"books, merely entertaining, produce the same effect upon the mental faculties, which a luxurious diet does upon the corporeal frame: they render it incapable of relishing those pure instructive writings, which possess all the intrinsic qualities of wholesome, unseasoned food" (qtd. in Ferris 38-39).29 The review of the Scenes of Clerical Life suggests just the opposite: it equates fictional narrative with bland "connective dough" and moral wisdom with tempting but unhealthy "plums." A hostile review of The Mill on the Floss takes the culinary image even further to contrast nutritious plot with dilute preaching: "We ask for meat, and she gives us pap-for a history, and she gives us sermons" (Carroll, Critical 146). The sugar has become the pill.
In 1870, an article on "The Uses of Fiction" chooses Eliot for an "example" of the problematic place of aphorisms in the novel. The essay begins by echoing Main's metaphor of the novel as a "vehicle" for "conveying" maxims, but ends by accusing the latter of "disfiguring" the former: There is no vehicle so useful as the novel for conveying odds and ends of knowledge.... If this is done with skill and grace, these chance embellishments greatly increase the pleasure one finds in reading the book. In the works of George Eliot, for example, we meet with simple phrases or sentences that are suggestive, and frequently more satisfactory than a ponderous volume.... But everything depends on the manner in which the novelist introduces these glimpses of thought, or erudition, or wit. They must not be obtruded, or the illusion of the story is destroyed. Mrs. Poyser must find a fitting occasion for her sarcasms; or we look upon her as mere puppet, and think of the hand that is pulling the cords. If a man uses a story for the purpose of stringing together maxims or reflections, then let him say so; and we accept as a graceful sort of foil--as in the case of Sartor Resartus, or Companions of my Solitude, or Henry Holbeach--the connecting link of narrative. The first and chief business of the novel, however, is to give us authentic descriptions of this or that section of the world; and we cannot have the face of the picture disfigured by prominent aphorisms. ("Uses" 8) This argument turns the language of the "beauty" against itself: the sayings that "embellish" at the beginning of the paragraph "disfigure the face" by the end of it. Yet even the initial praise defines maxims as ornamental, not functional. Rather than representing plot as the means to sweeten or disguise a moral, it represents narrative as the end that moralizing decorates (at best) or obstructs (at worst).
