George Eliot and the Gothic Novel: Genres, Gender and Feeling

By Royce Mahawatte

Royce Mahawatte critically compares the frightening, startling and melodramatic moments in George Eliot's fiction with excerpts from Gothic and sensation novels and in doing so argues that suspenseful plotting, and Gothic figures and tropes, play a role within Eliot's ambitions for the Victorian novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Mar 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783160334

Royce Mahawatte

Royce Mahawatte is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London.

Book preview

GEORGE ELIOT AND THE GOTHIC NOVEL

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

© Royce Mahawatte, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN      978-0-7083-2576-6

e-ISBN   978-1-78316-033-4

The right of Royce Mahawatte to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset in Wales by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Cardiff

Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Note on Names

List of abbreviations

Prologue

Introduction: ‘half-womanish, half-ghostly’: George Eliot and the Inheritance of the Gothic

Part I Reimagining the Genres of Feeling

1 ‘as if there was a demon in me’: ‘Janet’s Repentence’ and the Evangelical Gothic

2 ‘with two names written on it’: Sensation Narratives in Adam Bede

3 ‘of one texture with the rest of my existence’: ‘The Lifted Veil’ and the Tale of the Supernatural

Part II Uncanny Women, Fearing Men

4 Counterfeit Gothic Heroines in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch

5 Romola and Felix Holt, The Radical: The Pursuits of Paranoid Men

6 Finale: Daniel Deronda: Sensationalized Society, Gothicized Self

Epilogue

Notes

List of Works Cited and Consulted

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been in development for a long time and has been a part of so many conversations, that it would be impossible to thank everyone who has contributed to its making. A number of people have been particularly vital during this long gestation however. I would like to thank my supervisors of the original research: Dinah Birch, for her encouragement, ideas and support: Patricia Ingham, for her invaluable consolidation, and Helen Small for her constructive comments. I am also grateful for the financial assistance from the British Academy, the Pilkington Trust, and the Meyerstein Fund; to Trinity College, Oxford for awarding me the scholarships I received at this early stage; and to Virginia Murray at the John Murray Archive. In addition, I am also grateful to Richard Proudfoot, Paul Kenny and Leone Ormond, whose inspiring teaching set the scene for my interest in George Eliot and Victorian literature in general.

This publication would not have been possible without Benjamin Franklin Fisher and Andrew Smith, who believed in the project; the reviewers whose comments helped me to push this study further. Parts of this book have been reproduced with kind permission from Manchester University Press and Taylor Francis Journals, for which I am grateful; as I am for the permission from the estate of Steven Spurrier for the use of ‘Janet on the doorstep’ on the cover; and to Panter and Hall for their assistance here. I would like to thank my parents, sister, family friends and colleagues for their support and encouragement, and all my students, for talking to me in different ways about literary forms, abstractions and exponents. I would also like to thank especially Marina Angadi, John Bryden, Hilary Cave, Hilary Edwards, Mina Gorji, Kitty Hauser, William Hughes, Joy Lo Dico, Patrick O’Malley, Wendy Piatt, Catherine Spooner, and Christian and Anne Ward.

Finally, I thank Luke Robinson for his care and love which have made so many things possible.

Material from this book has been published as the following: ‘life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces: the silver fork novel, George Eliot and the fear of the material’, Women’s Writing, special issue: Silver Fork Novels, 19/1 (2009), 323−44 (www.tandfonline.com); ‘Beautiful lips kissing holy skulls and other emptinesses ecclesiastically enshrined: the counterfeit Gothic heroine in Middlemarch’, Gothic Studies, 10/2 (2008), 121−36; and ‘Daniel Deronda’s Jewish panic’, in W. Hughes and A. Smith (eds), Queering the Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).

NOTE ON NAMES

Throughout her life, Mary Anne Evans used a range of different names to refer to herself. For scholars researching into her life and work, this presents a problem of nomenclature. In this book, ‘George Eliot’ denotes the novelist and the letter-writing, literary persona. ‘Marian Evans’ will be used to refer to the individual, the translator, the journalist for the Westminster Review, and the woman who, throughout her life, read and responded to a range of Gothic genres. When the difference between these personae is unclear, I have used ‘George Eliot’ for convenience. In the notes, I have followed Gordon Haight’s convention of calling the writer of the letters ‘George Eliot’ even when Marian Evans was not corresponding as an author.

ABBREVIATIONS

Letters: The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1954−78)

Essays: Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963)

Haight, George Eliot: Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968)

Theodora: … As for the Jewish element in Deronda, I think it a very fine idea; it’s a noble subject. Wilkie Collins and Mrs Braddon would not have thought of it, but that does not condemn it. It shows a large conception of what one may do in a novel.

Henry James, ‘Daniel Deronda: A Conversation’

It was Tito who felt that clutch. He turned his head, and saw the face of his adoptive father, Baldassare Calvo, close to his own head.

The two men looked at each other, silent as death: Baldassare, with dark fierceness and a tightening grip of the soiled worn hands on the velvet-clad arm; Tito, with cheeks and lips all bloodless, fascinated by terror. It seemed a long while to them — it was but a moment.

The first sound Tito heard was the short laugh of Piero di Cosimo, who stood close by him and was the only person that could see his face.

‘Ha, ha! I know what a ghost should be now.’

George Eliot, Romola

‘You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.’

George Eliot, Middlemarch

I believe I was held to have a half-womanish, half-ghostly beauty; for the portrait-painters, who are thick as weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them.

George Eliot, ‘The Lifted Veil’

So many strange thoughts have crossed my mind every day, that events which would make a life-lasting impression on others, pass like shadows before me, while thoughts appear like substances. Emotions are my events—

Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

This book is dedicated to my parents, Ranjith Chandrasinghe Mahawatte (1925−86) and Jenita Florence Mahawatte.

Prologue

In the final chapter of The Mill on the Floss (1860), the shunned Maggie Tulliver, now lodging in riverside digs, contemplates answering a love letter from Stephen Guest. Outside the rain is falling.

With a cry of self-despair, Maggie fell on her knees against the table, and buried her sorrow-stricken face. Her soul went out to the Unseen Pity that would be with her to the end. Surely there was something taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know? ‘O God, if my life is to be long, let me live to bless and comfort —.

At that moment Maggie felt a startling sensation of sudden cold about her knees and feet: it was water flowing under her. She started up: the stream was flowing under the door that led into the passage. She was not bewildered for an instant — she knew it was the flood!¹

This passage, in fact this very moment of interruption in the novel, when Maggie senses the water and realizes that the flood is upon her, is a significant moment in Victorian Gothic and a problematic moment for nineteenth-century Realism. The location is clearly naturalistic, but George Eliot uses emphatic language to describe the experience. The kneeling Maggie, distracted from her own self-imposed religious restrictions, is ‘not bewildered for an instant’, yet the water is literally chilling and produces a ‘startling sensation’ on her feet and legs. Her longing to understand her situation brings her to contemplate the words of Thomas à Kempis and ‘the Unseen Pity’ (453) and the reader is brought to a purposely vague sense of divine compassion and sublimity. Maggie’s cry: ‘let me live to bless and comfort’ connects, rather ironically, with another text that has also been previously discussed: Walter Scott’s The Pirate (1822). This is a Gothic novel that Maggie has already rejected, and her words allude to the closing description of the lonely Minna Troil, who dedicates her life to friends and to the poor ‘whom she could serve and comfort’.² A part of the final surprise lies not in the appearance of the water, but in the emphatic ‘—’, that Maggie knows ‘the flood!’ (note the exclamation mark) is there, and even that it has come for her.

Both in mode and in its textual connections, this passage is more fitting to a non-naturalistic work − the flood can only increase in magnitude and in its supernatural signification and, of course, it is the highest development of the water imagery that has collected around Maggie during the course of the novel. While this moment might appear excessively emotional, or clumsily metaphorical, what follows on the last few pages is perhaps even more so, and since its publication the ending of this work has divided critical opinion. Maggie’s sensations clearly begin inside her, but in the following pages they consume the whole novel. In the flood sequence, to quote David Carroll: ‘the heroine breaks through into a different fictional reality.’³ Representation in these pages is gothicized. The impact of the destructive and all-renewing flood is, in terms of effect, comparable to the staggering opening of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), where a giant helmet falls from the sky, crushing the heir Prince Conrad to death and so creating the power vacuum that gives Manfred the opportunity to become a rapacious despot. Conversely, the powerless Maggie Tulliver is out of options because she refuses to take the one lifeline that is offered to her (‘Write me one word — say Come!’ − note the em dash and exclamation mark again) (452). She and St Oggs, as they face the unfathomable made both literal and literary, are in a realm of an unchartered Victorian Gothic. One which hides beneath the consensus of nineteenth- century Realism and so has been largely overlooked or misunderstood.

There are many other instances like this in George Eliot’s fiction.

Introduction

‘half-womanish, half-ghostly’:¹ George Eliot and the Inheritance of the Gothic

To compare George Eliot with Gothic novelists might seem surprising to many. She was an ambitious writer who wrote perceptively on intellectual topics and, in the main, about provincial lives; a writer who placed people, previously misrepresented in literature, in the minds of her readers. Her reception had developed according to the dominant critical mores of the time. A pedagogue of the human heart in her own lifetime; as an exemplary English and woman writer in the twentieth century, and in the twenty-first as a participant in cultural, historical, scientific and imperial paradigms. The image of Eliot as a ‘sage articulating universal truths’ has placed her at the summit of the novel’s naturalistic tradition, and far away from her popular and non-naturalistic competitors.²

The Chelsea Realist was, however, not always so lauded. A reviewer in 1861, who saw the rise of the sensation novel as an unfortunate fad, wrote in the Sixpenny Magazine:

Miss Evans (George Eliot), whose intense reality was universally appreciated when she produced her first remarkable picture of English domestic life, made a less powerful impression in her second, The Mill on the Floss, in consequence of having given a purely melodramatic termination to what was otherwise a finely wrought tale.³

In fact, despite its ending, The Mill on the Floss was, in some circles, viewed in the same light as sensation fiction: the fast-selling stories of crime, sexual scandal and startling melodramatic effects that brought the Gothic novel into the 1860s. Lady Amberley, a friend of the Leweses, had been forbidden by her mother to read the final volume of the novel when it was published.⁴ When the reader takes a step back from Eliot’s novels and works of short fiction, there is not only the scandal of the sensation novel that bears comparison, but, also plot-lines, allusions, scenarios and character types that bring to mind the Gothic novel of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In her earliest published fiction, George Eliot wrote about a woman connected to scandal: the Countess Czerlaski, in ‘The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton’, yet characters such as Maggie Tulliver, and Gwendolen Harleth, via both comparison and contrast, also tread in the same shadows as figures like Lady Audley in Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The counterparts to Eliot’s women are often rakish, brooding or inscrutable men with unsettling pasts: Tito Melema, ‘with cheeks and lips all bloodless, fascinated by terror’, Harold Transome and Henleigh Grandcourt with their secret histories. The complex narratives that bind Eliot’s novels are fortified with crimes and court cases, secrets, passionate confessions, starts, shudders and uncanny coincidences. At the same time, the highly fashioned prose style Eliot used contains imagery of the supernatural, fairy-tales, doubles, the occult and even elements from Gothic fiction itself. In Middlemarch (1871−2), Dorothea’s married life is described as a ‘walled-in maze’, while her husband Casaubon is pictured as ‘death’s head skinned over for the occasion’. And, if any more support were needed, in 1859 in the midst of the Liggins controversy over the authorship of Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot published the short story ‘The Lifted Veil’, a Gothic tale of clairvoyance and medical experimentation.⁵

The trappings and echoes of Gothic fiction exist alongside Eliot’s interest in naturalistic depiction and discursive authority. They often combine with them. George Eliot and the Gothic Novel: Genres, Gender, Feeling argues that, as well as involving the reader in startling effects, Gothic writing functions as a crucial binding force within Eliot’s novels, contributing to the ethical framework of the writing. Eliot used the Gothic for her own moral ends – its forms and tropes, its narrative shapes, its eighteenth-century origins; its sensitivity towards depicting masculine and feminine experience; its concerns with desires, selfhood and interiority. And at times, Eliot even deployed the unashamed and excessive emotionality of Gothic narratives, making emotion into event, sometimes for authorial and pedagogic reasons and sometimes as an end in itself.

Some Eliot scholars have incorporated the Gothic elements of Eliot’s work into critical discussion. George Eliot’s brand of naturalism has always attracted debate, but it has rarely been linked to Victorian Gothic writing. Feminist literary studies, however, have brought about advances in this area of George Eliot scholarship by looking at the work of the author in terms of women’s popular writing. In an article discussing Maggie Tulliver, Nina Auerbach, in 1975, compared The Mill on the Floss with ‘a Victorian subgenre of dubious respectability: the novel of sensation and, more particularly, the Gothic Romance’. Gilbert and Gubar’s work touched on the subject with their ideas of hidden anger in Eliot’s women. In 1980, Judith Wilt widened this approach to incorporate a psychological and thematic study of the Gothic in Eliot’s work, and Alexander Welsh’s important work on blackmail sees the sensation novel as an expression of Victorian anxieties concerning secularization and knowledge. For Welsh, Eliot uses the techniques of sensation fiction in order to rationalize and ironize a secular society obsessed with information, reputation and approval. In the 1990s, the renewed interest in sensation fiction, as an important genre with political implications, has led Lyn Pykett and Ann Cvetkovich to draw comparisons between the form and the love triangle in Daniel Deronda (1876), while Carol A. Martin’s bibliographical study makes some connections between the creative, publishing and marketing strategies of Eliot’s work, and those of sensation fiction. In addition, Eliot’s handling of the Deronda/Mordecai relationship has led Pamela Thurschwell to compare Daniel Deronda with ‘The Lifted Veil’ and to describe it as the author’s ‘apparently realist novel’.⁶

These critics have produced a fertile area for the discussion of the Gothic inheritance in the workings of Eliot’s mind but none have discussed the author’s work with particular reference to the Gothic novel, its characteristics, its traditions, its inheritances and its descendants. George Eliot and the Gothic Novel: Genres, Gender, Feeling will address this oversight. As the subtitle indicates, genre, the representation of gender and feeling connect in her work via the Gothic. This connection exists alongside the pressures and conventions of serial publication and a print culture that was becoming increasingly sensationalist. The discussion that follows will place Gothic writing at the centre of George Eliot’s creativity. It will show how popular and non-naturalistic fiction provided a medium for the literary expression of her secular humanist ethics, which, when viewed in this way, illustrate a means of systematizing feeling and event as both a literary and a pedagogic phenomenon. The ethics of George Eliot were often played out through the relationships between men and women, which figure as an important vocabulary in the language of genre. George Eliot and the Gothic Novel will explore the range of Gothic modes in the author’s writing: from plots to character types, from Gothic lexis to publishing strategies. It will link Eliot’s eclectic philosophy to the practice of fiction writing itself.

Gothic modalities, rhetorics of feeling

The consideration of Gothic writing in the work of a non-Gothic author requires some re-examination of both the nature of fiction genres and Victorian literary culture. The Sixpenny Magazine’s description of the ending of The Mill on the Floss as ‘melo-dramatic’ and Nina Auerbach’s discussion of Maggie Tulliver in terms of both Gothic and sensation writing, reveal a wide resource of critical terms that can be used to conceptualize the link between Eliot’s fiction and the inheritance of the Gothic. While the reviewer highlights the fatal flood which startles Maggie; Auerbach’s comment employs a critical fluidity that, pre-empting the work of Patrick Brantlinger and later Gothic studies, jumps between fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the sensationalism of the 1860s.⁷ The Gothic novel is an eighteenth-century form, yet at the same time, and in this case via the depiction of Maggie Tulliver, its traces reappear in a nineteenth-century work of Realism. This continuum of constant distinction and recognition is a key element of not just the genre, but also of the way that Gothic Studies itself has developed.

From the moment the reader learns of the giant helmet that falls from the sky in The Castle of Otranto it is clear that this hybrid form was very much concerned with its own relation to temporality, place and its own veracity. And yet it was also committed to advancing, at least in its early form, a sense of anti-neoclassical confusion or, as Robert Mighall presents it, a pro-Whig ideology. The Gothic tradition is a set of ideas, a series of tropes and yet, as Mighall also writes, it is also a mode. It is a rhetorical system, an abstract process manifesting as a literary one via the use of commonplaces. As an abstraction, the Gothic is concerned with the representation and management of incomprehension − fear, and by extension, with the representation of what is known and what is unknown. Not necessarily a code for understanding the unheimlich, but rather a literary mechanism for representing the unstable in illiberal times. Its earliest exponent is certainly the so-called ‘classic Gothic’ novel of the late 1700s; but the form is fluid and its tropes can easily be found within works of that period not strictly associated with the genre, such as the novels of female sensibility written by Frances Burney or Elizabeth Inchbald. ‘Classic Gothic’ is rich in its inheritances, and the early works are densely allusive themselves, drawing on folklore, fairy tales, Shakespearean and contemporary drama. It is identifiable because of its engagement with history, setting, Romantic ideas, and particular kinds of theatrical figures and behaviour.⁸ This element of intertextuality is crucial to the Gothic, because even the very earliest examples of the form often appear reminiscent of other works. The Gothic plays a recurring role in English literary history and so it follows that the form was revived in the early nineteenth century with works like Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), which took the form away from the Romance and into contemporary debates and methods of storytelling.

Yet, the Gothic did not end here − it evolved and multiplied and jostled against Realism to become a strident narrative modality in the nineteenth century. As the novel of sensation, it expressed the anxieties of bourgeois life in the 1860s, the changing roles of women; or popularized philosophical questions concerning the instability of empirical and forensic knowledge as representative tropes.⁹ Henry Mansel’s article on sensation fiction of 1863 includes not only the ‘bigamy novels’ of Braddon in his discussion, but also works such as James McGrigor Allen’s Nobly False (1863), which explored masculine sensibility as an unstable and seditious force.¹⁰ The form was varied. Victorian sensationalism is an amalgam of proliferating exponents, plot-lines, literary commonplaces, even just sentences and words that evoke its eighteenth-century inheritances. In addition there are mid-Victorian genres, not labelled ‘Gothic’, or even ‘sensational’, that do Gothic things. They exist as tropes and elements: a Gothic obscured within the popular, domestic and Realist literary landscape. Julian Wolfreys’s Derrida-inspired study of spectrality in Victorian writing focuses on the modal nature of genre rather than on discrete categories. Gothic tropes, appear ‘with-in the familiarity of textual forms, within the conventions of thought,’ rendering literary distinctions artificial. Reiterated haunting and repeating fears, specific to their context, fill other genres.¹¹ We cannot consider Eliot’s use of genre without looking at the range of Victorian subgenres that were available to her, as a nineteenth-century reader, reviewer and finally as a writer touched by the spectral, by the limits of social categories, by the anxieties of the self that fill her subject matter. Eliot’s writing connects to the Gothic, not simply via allusions to the Gothic novel of the Romantic period, though these certainly occur, but mainly via the exponential connections that the Gothic made with contemporary fictional forms – the evangelical novel, the occult novel, the tale of the supernatural, the silver-fork school, as well as the novel of sensation. These popular subgenres were utilized by Eliot and, though they are rarely identified as ‘Gothic novels’, I will demonstrate that they frequently deploy their methods. This deployment was something George Eliot exploited when it came to her own re-imagining of these forms.

These subgenres will be termed ‘genres of feeling’ because the literary representation of the management of feeling, particularly fear, though not always, is a prime concern of these forms of writing and is a concern that often presides over naturalistic representation.¹² Most interestingly, genres of feeling rarely fulfil the emotional abandonment they offer.¹³ They function around a contradiction: they express feeling in order to control and manage it. The overall effect is one of confusing anti-climax. Genres of feeling brandish powerful sensations at the reader and yet betray them by simple resolutions and an over-arching sense of providence: Gothic narratives often advance by shifting and increasing emotional states. For this study, a critical method that focuses on this type of representation is important because emotionality is an overriding and distinctive feature of the Gothic and its exponents, and also because in many places George Eliot’s fiction shows a particular investment in the way feeling is experienced. Scholars of the Gothic have a turbulent relationship with emotionality. Robert Mighall and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in opposing ways, reject the link to feeling, Mighall resists a psychoanalytic code, and for Sedgwick the Gothic is a series of interacting motifs, most notably, the literal and metaphorical veil. But managed feeling is an element that binds Gothic exponents, and Coral Anne Howells’s important study from 1978 focuses not so much on the psychological element of the form as on the medium used to convey feeling.¹⁴ And this medium is very often the representation of the body and, by extension, gender.

When the Gothic is considered as a rhetorical system, the written body becomes a surface for the representation of feeling. Psychology has dominated the discussion of the body in the Gothic, primarily because of the connection it makes to embodied female experience. Howells’s assertion that the Gothic is a form that articulates an ambiguous response to emotion is an important critical counterpoint because it does not try to interpret feeling in the Gothic, but instead tries to show how dramatic tradition, namely the mimetic techniques of melodrama, contributes to the language of the Gothic. I would like to develop this perspective as it offers some opportunities for working with the Gothic modalities in