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George Eliot and the fetish of realism
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2002 by Logan, Peter Melville
Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. (Essays 270)
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The effect described in these now-familiar words is based on a kind of moral magic. Art is given a transformational power in the assumption that it can fundamentally change even "the selfish" into a new selflessness, never before present. The "trivial" person's inward focus will change to an outward focus, so what is being described is a capacity to transform the reader or viewer morally, and this transformation occurs through an undefined and undefinable quality in art that is distinct from simple information of the kind Riehl's own book conveys. Art is "the nearest thing to life"; that is, realist art exists at the borderline between a representation of life and life as such (271). This liminal quality-unique to realist art, among all forms of created objects and discourses-is what differentiates it from information: it creates an illusion of being alive, as Lippi's audience illustrates. Its transformational power resides in this illusion, so that realism's power is premised on a singular as if. the subject is transformed by realist art as if art were life.34
Such a comparison raises the question of where, exactly, to situate the border between reforming influence and supernatural fetish-effect. For a Victorian novelist to imagine that her production would reform its readership is one thing, but at what point does it become an attribution of supernatural powers to the object? In broad terms, the border between moral influence and supernatural transformation was a porous one in Victorian culture, one that was crossed and re-crossed with regularity. When George Eliot refers to the "doll-Madonna in her shrine," she points to a pervasive example of that border crossing: the Angel in the House, an image of the power of moral influence that rapidly became fetishized. Even Coventry Patmore's name for this linchpin of domestic ideology posits a relationship between a spirit and a residence that mimics the structure of the primitive fetish, a spirit that becomes coterminous with its material embodiment. In Ruskin's essay "Of Queen's Gardens" he describes "the woman's true place and power" (Sesame 86). That place is less concrete than Patmore's "House," which is a purely figurative term for the domestic sphere. But the "power" is palpable, described as a radiant emanation influencing everyone it touches:
And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. The stars only may be over her head; the glow-worm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot: but home is yet wherever she is: and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with cedar, or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for those who else were homeless. (85-86)
