ABSTRACT
In Middlemarch George Eliot was writing a ‘domestic epic’, an oxymoron which would express the shared aspirations and rituals of a society, would give space to the most intense emotions and deepest moral questions, but, as the qualifier ‘domestic’ indicates, would be set on the level of family, inside houses, among ordinary circumstances - in the West Midlands rather than on the plains of windy Troy. Fluctuations, subtle movements, currents, shifts, slides, and alterations are emphasized in her early account of the society over time; so too are changes in proximity: Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of inter-dependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families that stood with rock firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self and beholder. Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of connection - gradually, as the old stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar guinea became extinct, while squires and baronets, and even lords who had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the faultiness of closer acquaintanceship. (p. 122) 1
This process offamiliarization was to be one not of reduction - the mock-heroic - but of intensification: the tragic. She was well aware of the absurdities that would be impressed on the reader by such closeness to the normal. Defamiliarization is a procedure of englam-ouring the humdrum: it allows the reader a magical distance from what has seemed ordinary. In Middlemarch the commentary sometimes wryly draws the reader’s attention to the awkwardness of hymning the everyday, or prying out the passionate implications of money-dealings. ‘Who was ever awestruck about a testator, or sang a hymn on the title to real-estate?’ (p. 336). ‘Testators’ and ‘real estate’, words from the discourse of legal dealings; ‘awestruck’ and ‘hymn’, words from religious and ritual discourse: the two distanced repertoires are set awkwardly in juxtaposition here. As so often, when we meet one of those moments of awkwardness, or facetiousness, in the narrative of George Eliot’s work, we are made aware of gaps of judgement and feeling over which language will not seamlessly spread itself. These gaps are indicative and symptomatic of shared suppressions, not the writer’s only. Just as we should always pay attention to Dorothea’s uncle, Mr Brooke, we should respond to these moments of embarrassment, which register disturbance, and loosen our assumptions.The writing is not simply mirroring society, as a ‘classic realist text’. Rather its discursive twists and turns set up turbulences which unsteady these reflections. This effect is intensified, as I shall show, by the ironic abrasions produced by the double time of the novel. The referential circle between the time of production and first reading - the 1870s - and the time of enactment, forty years earlier, is never quite a closed system. The unwritten time between the two, which is the time of George Eliot’s own life and of all her emotional, political, and intellectual involvement, disturbs the apparently reflective surface of the work. As later readers we may too placidly level the text and miss the circulating energies within it, which declare themselves both temporally and discursively.Middlemarch is concerned with bringing to the surface the implicit values by which people live their lives: within the plot the medium of evaluation is, over and over again, money. The quarrels in the book all have as a trigger money: whether these be between Lydgate and Rosamond, Mary Garth and Featherstone, Mr Brooke and his tenants, or even Dorothea and Casaubon. Since the establishment of the novel as a major form of fiction, there has been an easy slippage between the discourse of narration and the discourse of finance. Even
‘utterance’ had a trading meaning in the Middle Ages (and still does in specialized City and legal circles): utterance is bringing goods for sale; it requires a buyer as well as a seller for its meaning, an addressee as well as an addresser. ‘Telling’ likewise moves freely to and fro across counting and retailing, and retailing means both selling in small lots and retelling a story. The same slippage occurs in ‘an account’. Credit and crediting is the tightest conjunction of significations. We are allowed credit if our standing is good; we credit a story if we believe in its consistency or inclusiveness; we behave creditably; we perform discreditable acts and find ourselves out of credit.Trust is at the basis of credit; distrust is provoked by discreditable actions. Reputation, therefore - as we all still read daily in the newspapers - is essential to bargains struck and to permitted delays in payment. Reputation is essential to to a person’s value in the community. The loss of reputation is intrinsic to the loss of money in many situations. So gossip is not just a matter of background chorus but the agent of change. Gossip in novels is often discussed as if it were simply a way of conveying information to the reader, or provided a background of authentic popular chat and comedy: giving verisimilitude, and a foil for the distinguished main personages. On the contrary, gossip is a medium of transaction and, once it has been generated, it is hard to control its consequences. The world is ‘a huge whispering-gallery’ (p. 449), we are told in Middlemarch. Whispering galleries may offer us clear secret messages or the turgid brouhaha of crossed communications.In a work begun at the time that George Eliot was finishing Middlemarch in 1870, Walter Bagehot analysed Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market. He was writing in the light of the panic of 1866 which brought about the crash of the great City bank of Overend, Gurney & Co. (‘Ten Years ago’, he wrote, ‘that house stood next to the Bank of England in the City of London.’) George Eliot was writing Middlemarch in the period just after that crash. Money and gossip were much in people’s minds. Bagehot gives a generic description of the onset of financial panic:
At first, incipient panic amounts to a kind of vague conversation: Is A.B. as good as he used to be? Has not C.D. lost money? and a thousand such questions. A hundred people are talked about, and a thousand think - ‘Am I talked about, or am I not?’ ‘Is my credit as good as it used to be, or is it less?’ And every day, as a panic
grows, this floating suspicion becomes both more intense and more diffused; it attacks more persons, and attacks them all more virulently than at first.2
