A World Governed By Chaos
KM Newton, Modernizing George Eliot: The Writer as Artist, Proto-Modernist, Cultural Critic
Bloomsbury, 240pp, £24.99, ISBN 9781474275682
reviewed by Helen Tope
George Eliot’s sweeping, panoramic novels of 19th-century life form an integral part of the British literary canon; it is hard to think of a writer more ‘establishment’ than Eliot. In Modernizing George Eliot: The Writer as Artist, Proto-Modernist, Cultural Critic, KM Newton goes about the business of challenging the critical view of George Eliot as a conservative figure. Instead of seeing her work as mired in Victorian conventionality, Newton proposes a radical re-interpretation, inviting us to view Eliot from both an artistic and philosophical perspective. He paints a portrait of a novelist and thinker who was right at the epicentre of the scientific, philosophical and artistic innovations taking place in Victorian Britain.
Far from being conservative, Eliot’s approach to her writing (and her personal life) was consciously hostile to the suffocating Victorian values that controlled the populace. Eliot’s otherness is fundamental to the work she produced – had she suppressed her intellectual curiosity we would be reading a very different author today. There is no Middlemarch (1871) without Darwinism; no Silas Marner (1861) without the writings of Thomas Carlyle. With George Eliot, you separate the artist and the intellectual at your peril.
Newton’s essays on Eliot’s use of the narrator provide compelling evidence for understanding Eliot as a proto-modernist. Eliot’s use of a consciously-drawn, self-alluding narrator forms a modernist pre-cursor; rather than creating a seamless connection between author, narrator and novel, she shows us the workings that lie beneath. The narrator is Eliot’s great literary experiment. The Victorian narrator (omniscient, authoritative and, by implication, male) is here subverted: the narrator is a separate construct from the author, interjecting and interrupting the narrative. Chapter 17 of 1859’s Adam Bede (‘In Which the Story Pauses a Little’) divides opinion right down the middle. The narrator hits pause on the fiction and goes off on a tangent. First-time readers of the novel take note: you will either find this delightful or deeply frustrating.
Of course, the use of an unreliable narrator is not exclusive to Eliot. Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights (1847) puts her narrators to good use in unsettling the reader. But with Eliot, we have more than one book – a prolonged exploration of what happens when the reader is not gently guided through the fiction. Instead, Eliot asks the reader to form their own judgements. The reader becomes an active participant – a device that anticipates modernist fiction by half a century. In a literary landscape of omniscient voices, Eliot chooses fragmentation. The splintering of the narrative voice gets even more complicated when we consider that ‘George Eliot’ itself is a fiction; a pen-name that allowed the author both privacy and a freer artistic rein. Are we reading the views of George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans, The Narrator, or None of the Above? It is never quite clear, argues Newton, and this is what separates Eliot from her contemporaries.
Newton takes great care in delineating George Eliot, the intellectual: that formidable intellect – the novelist, the translator, the philosopher. She appears most clearly to us when viewed through this prism. Eliot lived through an era of enormous social, religious and political upheaval. It would have been impossible for a woman of her intelligence to remain unaffected. Her ability to embrace new ideas runs through every aspect of her fiction. To write like a modernist, you first have to think like one.
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, and George Eliot read the controversial bestseller soon after it was published. However, critics have long argued that Herbert Spencer was the more prominent influence on Eliot. A true Victorian polymath, and personal friend of George Eliot, Spencer first discussed his perspective on evolution in an essay for the Westminster Review in 1857. Spencer’s idea was straightforward: he believed that all forms of life had originated from a simple homogeneity and evolved into a complex heterogeneity. The progress of every living thing – from a star to a dung beetle – was linear.
Spencer posited that an endlessly progressing evolution could be no better illustrated than the growth and development of human society. He conceptualised society as a ‘social organism’, having evolved from a basic structure of hierarchy and obedience, to a more complex system of social customs. Even the casual reader of Eliot’s work can recognise that there is a case to be made in Spencer’s favour. The web-like structure of Middlemarch, Eliot’s model society, is a perfect translation of Spencer’s universe. The Vincys, Garths and Lydgates are all interconnected by blood and history. But Newton argues that it is Darwin, not Spencer that had the greater influence on the writer’s fiction. Indeed, Newton goes so far as to rate Eliot as Darwin’s ‘most … intellectually sophisticated critic.’ After reading Darwin, Spencer coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’ in his own book Principles of Biology (1864). It is this phrase that is central for Newton. Eliot is persuaded by Darwin that rather than a purposeful evolution, it is more a question of adaptation. The species that prevails isn’t necessarily there by merit; success is dependent on the ability to adapt and thrive.
Eliot applied this thinking to a social sphere, observing that there is every possibility that the ‘worst’ human could evolve better and faster than the ‘best.’ It was this idea that most disturbed Darwin’s earliest readers: the world had not progressed with order and purpose at its centre. The defining rule was chance. In a world governed by chaos, where did this leave morality?
This posed an irresistible challenge to Eliot, who explored this theory in novels such as Daniel Deronda (1876) and Felix Holt (1866). Newton argues that the character of Christian in Felix Holt is Eliot’s testing of how a ‘Darwinian’ character would operate in the real world. Holt’s ability to jettison any aspect of morality in order to get ahead clearly fascinates the author. But Eliot interprets Darwin’s world as unyielding – even Felix is vulnerable to this. It leads the reader to question whether his behaviour is morally reprehensible or simply a case of Holt choosing to give himself the best advantage in an unfair and unjust society. The novel’s full title is Felix Holt, the Radical, and there is definitely a sense that Eliot’s interests in evolution and morality were at cross-purposes. Eliot allows Holt to fail because his actions isolate him from the rest of society. This survival strategy might work in the animal kingdom, but Eliot sees Felix’s stratagem as unsustainable, because humans have become socialised, both by interaction and the acquisition of language. Characters like Middlemarch’s Bulstrode may operate by self-interest, but ultimately they are at odds with themselves.
In Daniel Deronda, the character of Lapidoth sees Eliot sketching out her fullest, darkest interpretation of Darwin’s theory. Lapidoth is purely Darwinian, adapting to circumstances by any means necessary. It is no accident that he is a keen gambler in Eliot’s novel. He lives on chance. Lapidoth is drawn without any moral centre, choosing to live at an animal level of consciousness. His ability to switch off that moral component foreshadows the pessimistic readings of Darwinism that came later, in such novels as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). There is very much a sense of the neo-Gothic in Lapidoth – he’d have no problem navigating the streets of Edinburgh. While Eliot cannot ignore this aspect of Darwinism, she remains tethered to a strong sense of morality, or rather, she chooses to remain tethered. Eliot has been criticised for her view that morality stems from an intuitive sense of ‘goodness.’ But Eliot saw morality as both an individual and collective responsibility.
In his book Past and Present (1843) Thomas Carlyle writes of the impact of the systematic industrialisation of towns and cities. Carlyle’s concern was that society was becoming mechanistic and inorganic at the expense of its spirituality. Both Carlyle and Eliot saw this sweep towards industrialisation as having the potential to isolate and alienate both communities and the individual. Although Eliot’s writing discusses how ideals can shape action, says Newton, there seems to be little optimism on Eliot’s part that this can actually be achieved.
We can see this struggle expressed in Silas Marner, a novel that openly criticises Victorian values. With its fairy-tale-like structure, Silas Marner may not seem obviously contentious, but as Newton argues, there is a tension between the structure of the novel and its content that demands a fresh perspective. Silas’s world is far from a fairy-tale; instead Eliot presents us with a Darwinian universe, indifferent to human needs. Silas’s attempt to reconcile his religious views with the new world order sees his work ethic and subsequent accumulation of wealth estrange him from society even further. While the post-Industrial age produced innovation and social reform, none of this optimism is on show in Silas Marner. No character in the novel lives happily or unhappily ever after; the ambiguity derives from the fact that Eliot cannot resolve Silas’ religious views with a post-industrial society. Progress is necessary, suggests Eliot, but at a cost.
Eliot has often been accused of didacticism, but Newton argues that rather than being a novelist with heavy-duty morals, Eliot is instead a moral philosopher: she offers no easy answers, only lots of questions. This sense of uncertainty elevates Eliot’s fiction out of its Victorian cultural context. Her ability to tackle uncomfortable subjects (poverty, infidelity, racism) are what gives her novels their realism, but the lack of resolution, the absence of happy endings – that’s what makes her work irrefutably modern.
Newton brings to light something that George Eliot’s readers have instinctively known: here is a novelist for whom philosophy and art aren’t mutually exclusive. They live together in the same page, each improving the other by its presence. Eliot’s ideas – on Nature, Darwinism and morality – immediately marked her out as an intellectual tour de force from her earliest novels and short stories. Facing an uncertain future not only coloured what Eliot wrote about, but the way in which she chose to express those ideas. Her fiction may appear the work of a Victorian realist, but read deeper and you see the techniques of a modernist. The stylised, conscious use of a narrator draws a direct link between Eliot and the literature of the 20th century. Her work separates itself from the Victorian oeuvre because she herself was an outsider. Shunned by the establishment, Eliot wrote and thought differently. As a result, the psychological realism of her novels aligns her not with her contemporaries, but instead with writers such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf. But Eliot didn’t just intellectualise the human experience; she turned her art into autobiography.
Eliot wrote in the same way she chose to live her life – defying convention, embracing all aspects of life without apology or censure. A voice of dissent in an age of tradition, there’s no more complete definition of the artist – and George Eliot wrote it herself.
Far from being conservative, Eliot’s approach to her writing (and her personal life) was consciously hostile to the suffocating Victorian values that controlled the populace. Eliot’s otherness is fundamental to the work she produced – had she suppressed her intellectual curiosity we would be reading a very different author today. There is no Middlemarch (1871) without Darwinism; no Silas Marner (1861) without the writings of Thomas Carlyle. With George Eliot, you separate the artist and the intellectual at your peril.
Newton’s essays on Eliot’s use of the narrator provide compelling evidence for understanding Eliot as a proto-modernist. Eliot’s use of a consciously-drawn, self-alluding narrator forms a modernist pre-cursor; rather than creating a seamless connection between author, narrator and novel, she shows us the workings that lie beneath. The narrator is Eliot’s great literary experiment. The Victorian narrator (omniscient, authoritative and, by implication, male) is here subverted: the narrator is a separate construct from the author, interjecting and interrupting the narrative. Chapter 17 of 1859’s Adam Bede (‘In Which the Story Pauses a Little’) divides opinion right down the middle. The narrator hits pause on the fiction and goes off on a tangent. First-time readers of the novel take note: you will either find this delightful or deeply frustrating.
Of course, the use of an unreliable narrator is not exclusive to Eliot. Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights (1847) puts her narrators to good use in unsettling the reader. But with Eliot, we have more than one book – a prolonged exploration of what happens when the reader is not gently guided through the fiction. Instead, Eliot asks the reader to form their own judgements. The reader becomes an active participant – a device that anticipates modernist fiction by half a century. In a literary landscape of omniscient voices, Eliot chooses fragmentation. The splintering of the narrative voice gets even more complicated when we consider that ‘George Eliot’ itself is a fiction; a pen-name that allowed the author both privacy and a freer artistic rein. Are we reading the views of George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans, The Narrator, or None of the Above? It is never quite clear, argues Newton, and this is what separates Eliot from her contemporaries.
Newton takes great care in delineating George Eliot, the intellectual: that formidable intellect – the novelist, the translator, the philosopher. She appears most clearly to us when viewed through this prism. Eliot lived through an era of enormous social, religious and political upheaval. It would have been impossible for a woman of her intelligence to remain unaffected. Her ability to embrace new ideas runs through every aspect of her fiction. To write like a modernist, you first have to think like one.
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, and George Eliot read the controversial bestseller soon after it was published. However, critics have long argued that Herbert Spencer was the more prominent influence on Eliot. A true Victorian polymath, and personal friend of George Eliot, Spencer first discussed his perspective on evolution in an essay for the Westminster Review in 1857. Spencer’s idea was straightforward: he believed that all forms of life had originated from a simple homogeneity and evolved into a complex heterogeneity. The progress of every living thing – from a star to a dung beetle – was linear.
Spencer posited that an endlessly progressing evolution could be no better illustrated than the growth and development of human society. He conceptualised society as a ‘social organism’, having evolved from a basic structure of hierarchy and obedience, to a more complex system of social customs. Even the casual reader of Eliot’s work can recognise that there is a case to be made in Spencer’s favour. The web-like structure of Middlemarch, Eliot’s model society, is a perfect translation of Spencer’s universe. The Vincys, Garths and Lydgates are all interconnected by blood and history. But Newton argues that it is Darwin, not Spencer that had the greater influence on the writer’s fiction. Indeed, Newton goes so far as to rate Eliot as Darwin’s ‘most … intellectually sophisticated critic.’ After reading Darwin, Spencer coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’ in his own book Principles of Biology (1864). It is this phrase that is central for Newton. Eliot is persuaded by Darwin that rather than a purposeful evolution, it is more a question of adaptation. The species that prevails isn’t necessarily there by merit; success is dependent on the ability to adapt and thrive.
Eliot applied this thinking to a social sphere, observing that there is every possibility that the ‘worst’ human could evolve better and faster than the ‘best.’ It was this idea that most disturbed Darwin’s earliest readers: the world had not progressed with order and purpose at its centre. The defining rule was chance. In a world governed by chaos, where did this leave morality?
This posed an irresistible challenge to Eliot, who explored this theory in novels such as Daniel Deronda (1876) and Felix Holt (1866). Newton argues that the character of Christian in Felix Holt is Eliot’s testing of how a ‘Darwinian’ character would operate in the real world. Holt’s ability to jettison any aspect of morality in order to get ahead clearly fascinates the author. But Eliot interprets Darwin’s world as unyielding – even Felix is vulnerable to this. It leads the reader to question whether his behaviour is morally reprehensible or simply a case of Holt choosing to give himself the best advantage in an unfair and unjust society. The novel’s full title is Felix Holt, the Radical, and there is definitely a sense that Eliot’s interests in evolution and morality were at cross-purposes. Eliot allows Holt to fail because his actions isolate him from the rest of society. This survival strategy might work in the animal kingdom, but Eliot sees Felix’s stratagem as unsustainable, because humans have become socialised, both by interaction and the acquisition of language. Characters like Middlemarch’s Bulstrode may operate by self-interest, but ultimately they are at odds with themselves.
In Daniel Deronda, the character of Lapidoth sees Eliot sketching out her fullest, darkest interpretation of Darwin’s theory. Lapidoth is purely Darwinian, adapting to circumstances by any means necessary. It is no accident that he is a keen gambler in Eliot’s novel. He lives on chance. Lapidoth is drawn without any moral centre, choosing to live at an animal level of consciousness. His ability to switch off that moral component foreshadows the pessimistic readings of Darwinism that came later, in such novels as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). There is very much a sense of the neo-Gothic in Lapidoth – he’d have no problem navigating the streets of Edinburgh. While Eliot cannot ignore this aspect of Darwinism, she remains tethered to a strong sense of morality, or rather, she chooses to remain tethered. Eliot has been criticised for her view that morality stems from an intuitive sense of ‘goodness.’ But Eliot saw morality as both an individual and collective responsibility.
In his book Past and Present (1843) Thomas Carlyle writes of the impact of the systematic industrialisation of towns and cities. Carlyle’s concern was that society was becoming mechanistic and inorganic at the expense of its spirituality. Both Carlyle and Eliot saw this sweep towards industrialisation as having the potential to isolate and alienate both communities and the individual. Although Eliot’s writing discusses how ideals can shape action, says Newton, there seems to be little optimism on Eliot’s part that this can actually be achieved.
We can see this struggle expressed in Silas Marner, a novel that openly criticises Victorian values. With its fairy-tale-like structure, Silas Marner may not seem obviously contentious, but as Newton argues, there is a tension between the structure of the novel and its content that demands a fresh perspective. Silas’s world is far from a fairy-tale; instead Eliot presents us with a Darwinian universe, indifferent to human needs. Silas’s attempt to reconcile his religious views with the new world order sees his work ethic and subsequent accumulation of wealth estrange him from society even further. While the post-Industrial age produced innovation and social reform, none of this optimism is on show in Silas Marner. No character in the novel lives happily or unhappily ever after; the ambiguity derives from the fact that Eliot cannot resolve Silas’ religious views with a post-industrial society. Progress is necessary, suggests Eliot, but at a cost.
Eliot has often been accused of didacticism, but Newton argues that rather than being a novelist with heavy-duty morals, Eliot is instead a moral philosopher: she offers no easy answers, only lots of questions. This sense of uncertainty elevates Eliot’s fiction out of its Victorian cultural context. Her ability to tackle uncomfortable subjects (poverty, infidelity, racism) are what gives her novels their realism, but the lack of resolution, the absence of happy endings – that’s what makes her work irrefutably modern.
Newton brings to light something that George Eliot’s readers have instinctively known: here is a novelist for whom philosophy and art aren’t mutually exclusive. They live together in the same page, each improving the other by its presence. Eliot’s ideas – on Nature, Darwinism and morality – immediately marked her out as an intellectual tour de force from her earliest novels and short stories. Facing an uncertain future not only coloured what Eliot wrote about, but the way in which she chose to express those ideas. Her fiction may appear the work of a Victorian realist, but read deeper and you see the techniques of a modernist. The stylised, conscious use of a narrator draws a direct link between Eliot and the literature of the 20th century. Her work separates itself from the Victorian oeuvre because she herself was an outsider. Shunned by the establishment, Eliot wrote and thought differently. As a result, the psychological realism of her novels aligns her not with her contemporaries, but instead with writers such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf. But Eliot didn’t just intellectualise the human experience; she turned her art into autobiography.
Eliot wrote in the same way she chose to live her life – defying convention, embracing all aspects of life without apology or censure. A voice of dissent in an age of tradition, there’s no more complete definition of the artist – and George Eliot wrote it herself.