ABSTRACT

Audrey Jaffe explores the fear—both Victorian and modern—that the social order may break down because characters and persons are unreadable to one another, employing Erving Goffman’s twentieth-century theories on how individuals perform social roles to revisit George Eliot’s critique of egotism in Middlemarch. Eliot reveals, Jaffe argues, the ease with which one individual, such as Raffles or Bulstrode or Dorothea herself, can, by their inability or unwillingness to perceive the “cues” being performed by others, violently disrupt the characters’ shared social world. The consequences of such breakdowns, however, ultimately redound on the “awkward giant” themselves: as Jaffe demonstrates, individual and group subjectivities are mutually constitutive within Goffman’s and Eliot’s shared sense of the social.