George Eliot and the production of consumers

The consequences of that reversal are still with us. A hundred years after "The Uses of Fiction" decrees that moral generalizations "must not be obtruded," W.J. Harvey is still urging readers to ignore Eliot's "authorial intrusions" and "moral comments": "These comments are a means to an end; they are one of the bridges between our world and the world of the novel. They are not ends in themselves, not the proper objects of our contemplation. And we are meant to pass easily and quickly over these comments" (81).32 Where Main calls the narrative a vehicle for the sayings, Harvey reduces the sayings to a bridge into the narrative. His claim that the moral comments are "not the proper objects of our contemplation" revives the tone of ginger distaste that critics had earlier used to describe Eliot's union with Lewes. Twenty years later, when Dorothea Barrett celebrates Eliot's "rebelliousness and eroticism" while calling her sibylline image "unfortunate," didactic tone finally replaces sexual acts as the transgression that admirers need to explain away (109).33

Harvey presents skipping ("passing quickly over") not only as the ideal but as an unavoidable norm. He clinches the apology that "the number and length of such [moral] comments is not as great as some critics assume" with the assertion that "the great majority of intrusive comments last for only two or three sentences and with rare exceptions are surely passed over by the impetus of any non-analytical reading" (90). The fact that such "intrusions" are more frequently reproduced than any other part of George Eliot's work-in anthologies, reviews, and critical studies including Harvey's own-does not in itself disprove this last argument, because quotation is always a product of analysis in the most literal sense. Yet no positive evidence can be imagined either, since the "non-analytical reading" for which Harvey speaks leaves no trace to prove what it skips and where it lingers. More fundamentally, the invitation to quicken our pace assumes that all readers can recognize those moments when the text shifts from narrative to saying. To skip sententious passages one must first identify them, in the same way that even the silliest lady readers, according to Eliot, unerringly recognize platitudes to mark in the margin. This would suggest in turn that "non-analytical" readers identify sententious passages as systematically as do critics who adduce them as evidence, reviewers who excerpt them as specimens, and editors who collect them in anthologies. The only difference is that each group ignores what the other prizes. The nineteenth-century reversal in the relative status of narrative and sententiousness makes clear how arbitrary those markers of readerly difference are, but also how powerful. So does the association of women with each in turn. The energy with which Eliot's editors and critics distinguish those who read for the plot from those who read against it suggests that the "rise of the novel" reinforces the social and aesthetic hierarchies that it appears to challenge. By exchanging the novel's difference from other genres for a gendered difference within its own public, Eliot's career opens the way for professional criticism of the novel in the twentieth century.