George Eliot and the fetish of realism

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2002 by Logan, Peter Melville

That George Eliot was well versed in Positivism by this date is certain, but it is also clear that her familiarity with Comte's philosophy predates the relationship with Lewes by several years. In an 1849 letter, she mentions lending out a copy of Mill's Logic (1: 310). In 1851, she refers to it as her "reference book" (1: 363). She moved to London from Coventry in January 1851 (when she changed her name to Marian Evans), and, during that first year, she was already actively promoting Comte's writing; we know, for example, that she urged Herbert Spencer to read Comte (Paxton 18). Her first printed reference to Comte appears in a review of Robert William Mackay's The Progress of the Intellect, which appeared in the January 1851 Westminster Review, that she wrote before the move to London. She takes issue with Mackay's narrative of religious development.

He positions "the primitive period of myth" as a degeneration from an original "monotheistic or pantheistic impression," rather than being "a step in advance of fetishism" (Essays 37).20 The Christian orthodox position, based on Genesis, held that monotheism was the original form of worship, and this is the narrative that Mackay endorses. Both de Brosses and Comte countered this view with their theory of an original fetishism. And so, in this passage, George Eliot defends the positivist narrative of development. This apparently minor point helps to establish the context for her criticism of Positivists, for their inattention to the importance of the past. Comte's followers "are prone to under-rate critical research into ancient modes of life and forms of thought.... But it would be a very serious mistake to suppose that the study of the past and the labours of criticism have no important practical bearing on the present" (27-28). Rather than a substantive disagreement with the Positivist theory of development, the complaint insists on its broad applicability to analyses of the present. Contemporary life is littered with survivals from antiquity, "lifeless barbarisms" or "petrifications from distant ages" (28). Study of the past is essential to recognize them, and thus to understand the present. She explains: "We are in bondage to terms and conceptions which, having had their root in conditions of thought no longer existing, have ceased to possess any vitality, and are for us as spells which have lost their virtue" (28). These lifeless concepts are idola theatri, a term that harks back to Comte's fetishism as the attribution of life to lifeless artifacts (29). We can identify the primitivism of Ilfracombe's celebration in its own idola theatri: the "melancholy foot-races" and "feeble fire-works" (Letters 2: 248). In contrast to these listless residues, she notes how "fine" it was to see the bonfires, which "made one think of the times when such fires were lighted as signals to arm-the symbol of a common cause and a common feeling" (2: 248). Their vitality lies in the past, however, and they survive as fetishized petrifactions that keep Ilfracombe natives in bondage to the primitive.