George Eliot and the fetish of realism

Sit divus, dummodo non sit vivus (let him be a god, provided he be not living), said the Roman magnates of Romulus; and so men say of women, let them be idols, useless absorbents of precious things, provided we are not obliged to admit them to be strictly fellow-- beings, to be treated, one and all, with justice and sober reverence. (205)

George Eliot contrasts this doll-fetish ideology with the realistic treatment women receive in Fuller's and Wollstonecraft's two works; for both authors, the "ardent hopes of what women may become do not prevent them from seeing and painting women as they are" (205).

The critique of fetishism in George Eliot's early novels is less censorious than in her non-fiction. Typical is the compassionate description of Mrs. Tulliver weeping over her "Teraphim, or Household Gods" (Mill 176). She sits alone in the storeroom, where "her linen and all her precious 'best things'" are spread out before her (177). "'But I shouldn't ha' minded so much if we could ha' kept the things wi' my name on 'em,'" she explains, referring to the tablecloths she had marked with "a particular stitch" (178). In Feuerbachian fashion, Mrs. Tulliver's grief is not simply over the loss of her material god but of a god that bears the marks of her own invention. Within this scene Maggie plays the role of anti-fetishist. She upbraids her mother and brother for caring more about "table-cloths and china" than "her father, who was lying there in a sort of living death" (179). The first, then, are re-evaluated as material objects, while the second-her paralyzed father himself transformed into an object-has his alive-ness reasserted.

George Eliot's most familiar, explicit reference to fetishism occurs earlier in the same novel. Instead of the seclusion of Mrs. Tulliver's storeroom, Maggie is sobbing in her attic sanctuary, engaging in her own ritual: "here she kept a Fetish which she punished for all her misfortunes" (24). This doll, "now entirely defaced by a long career of vicarious suffering," contains the spirit of Aunt Glegg, and Maggie's revenge has to be moderated. Used to driving nails into its head, she "reflected that if she drove many nails in, she would not be so well able to fancy that the head was hurt when she knocked it against the wall" (25).24 Rather than a living fetish, the doll is at the threshold of being reduced to its sheer materiality as splinters of wood. So the child moderates her revenge and "soothe[s] herself by alternately grinding and beating the wooden head" (25). The narrating voice adopts the anti-fetishist stance here-a stance that is strongly compassionate, while also detached. The narrator's language suggests an indulgent humor in the representation of Maggie: to be "soothed" by the violent actions of "grinding and beating" is a primitive image of catharsis, one well suited to representing the irrational passions of an undeveloped fetishist. This passage, along with the previous one, contrasts the highly developed narrator's voice with the primitive fetishism of the Tullivers, but it is a compassion that, in this light, parallels the benevolence of the colonizer for the colonized, the advanced society for the undeveloped, or the Ilfracombe tourist for the primitive provincials.