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George Eliot and the fetish of realism
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2002 by Logan, Peter Melville
This language describes an active energy radiating outward from the domestic ideal; in this sense of the Angel as a radiant body possessed of an active power to affect others, Ruskin's Queen crosses the borderline and enters the terrain of the supernatural. The figure of the Angel in the House is one of the most ubiquitous of Victorian fetishes; she becomes quite simply a body inhabited by domestic ideals, the residence of a benevolent spirit.
George Eliot's periodical reviews attribute the same active, radiant power found in Ruskin's Queen to her favorite realist writers, which leads to a conflict within Eliot's writing between representations of fetishism, like the doll-Madonna, and its inverse, the fetishism of representation. We can see this conflict play out when she borrows the latter's terms from the sentimental language of domestic ideology in her praise of Carlyle, for example: "It is not as a theorist, but as a great and beautiful human nature, that Carlyle influences us," she begins; he "warms your heart by the pressure of his hand, and looks out on the world with so clear and loving an eye, that nature seems to reflect the light of his glance upon your own feeling" (Essays 214). While the gender terminology is male, the mode of influence is indistinguishable from Ruskin's definition of the Queen's power, a writer's "clear light" that alters everyone who comes within range of it (214). One has to stop oneself for a moment to remember that George Eliot is actually describing the effect of a book rather than of a person. And in this case it is a book that seems as if it were a person, as if it contained Carlyle's spirit within its covers and could have the same effect.
This fusion of object and spirit is consistent with George Eliot's highest goals as a writer. She describes grappling with the difficulty of accomplishing these goals in a letter to her friend, the Positivist Frederic Harrison: "[I] have gone through again and again the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit" (Selections 318). This line of thought in Eliot's writing is part of her inheritance from Feuerbach's examination of God as a fetishistic projection of human feeling. "All religious cosmogonies are products of the imagination," he (as does Marian Evans) writes, and this leads him to suggest the value of harnessing that human tendency to project feelings onto objects, which then seem alive (80): "And the task of philosophy in investigating this subject is to comprehend the relation of the imagination to the reason,-the genesis of the image by means of which an object of thought becomes an object of sense, of feeling" (81). It makes sense that the novelist would want to "comprehend" this subject and understand the "genesis" of images, like the image of God, that seem to take on the solidity of objects of sense and feeling. Within that genesis lie the psychological processes by which representation can take on the quality of life. Understanding how human beings unintentionally generate such images is "the task of philosophy," but it is also the task of any writer interested in the intentional creation of images that are more in line with that pre-existing psychological mechanism. Feuerbach thus holds the promise of making "ideas thoroughly incarnate" through a better understanding of the machinery of fetishism, and this is the promise over which George Eliot labors in her writing. Feuerbach gave Eliot much more than a voice with which to critique the fetishism of everyday life. He also provided her with a means of tapping into the power of that ubiquitous fetishism and putting it to use in her realist mode of representation.
