George Eliot and the production of consumers

The charge that maxims interrupt the "business of the novel" restates David Masson's argument-in a more ambivalent discussion of "the interfusion of exposition with fiction" published eleven years earlier in British Novelists and their Styles-that "the proper limits within which a poet or other artist may seek to inculcate doctrine" depend on whether one accepts or rejects the consensus that "the representation of social reality is, on the whole, the proper business of the novel" (308).3o But it echoes even more closely the language of a reviewer who asserts in 1865 that "a novel ceases to be a novel when it aims at philosophical teaching. It is not the vehicle for conveying knowledge. Its business is to amuse" (qtd. in Graham 86; emphasis added). "The Uses of Fiction" eliminates the chiasmus equating writers' "business" with readers' "amusement": its concession that sayings give "pleasure" confirms its charge that they disrupt "business."

I suggested earlier that "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" attributes a taste for sententiousness to women readers and women novelists. Evans's gendering of the maxim appears surprising at first, for it clashes with a more traditional (but equally misogynistic) belief that women read frivolously for the plot, men seriously for ideas. That contradiction can be explained in part by the assumption that men get their ideas from genres other than the novel. But it can also be explained, I think, by a historical shift in assumptions about the place of moralizing in fiction-and about the structure of literary works-which culminates in reviewers' distrust of Eliot's self-contained maxims. In 1751, Samuel Richardson prefigured Main's project of extracting maxims from novels when he marketed his own Collection of ... Moral and Instructive SENTIMENTS, CAUTIONS, APHORISMS, REFLECTIONS and OBSERVATIONS contained in the History [of Clarissa]. By offering his Collection as a corrective to the frivolity of "young People; who are apt to read rapidly with a View only to Story" Richardson anticipates Main's claim that "the narrative part of those Letters was only meant as a vehicle for the instructive" (ix; emphasis added). Samuel Johnson echoes this logic when he observes that "if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted, that you would hang yourself. But you must read [Richardson] for the sentiment, and consider the story as giving occasion to the sentiment" (Boswell 480). Where Richardson attributes the desire for "story" to one marginal audience ("young people"), later critics attribute a taste for the "aphorisms, reflections, and observations" against which Richardson defines "story" to a different series of vulgar readers: in Dicey's review, the "large class of persons" who care more for individual maxims than for the continuity of the whole; in William Blackwood's letter, the "colonial class of readers" who buy anthologies of sayings rather than the novels from which they are taken; and in "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," the "class of readers to whom [platitudinous] remarks appear peculiarly pointed and pungent." Where Johnson had attacked the audience that "read Richardson for the story," a hundred years later the reviewer who states in the first person that "we ask for story" includes himself among it.31 Where eighteenth-century critics accused fiction of taking readers away from their business, and plot of distracting them from morals, Eliot's reviewers worry instead that moral discourse distracts her from the business of fiction. And once Victorian critics have reversed the older hierarchy that subordinates the narrative to the sententious, it becomes logical to switch the gender of the two as well: to replace the figure of the self-indulgent female fiction-reader with the self-important female sage. In the process, the anthologies intended to inscribe Eliot within a masculine tradition become instead the sign of personal vanity, feminine vulgarity, and aesthetic failure.