ABSTRACT
In George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch-a novel not generally characterised by parodic playfulness-there is a scene in which Mr Brooke, who is standing for election, has to make a speech to an unruly crowd. As he speaks from the balcony of an inn, an effigy of himself is displayed which, by virtue of a ventriloquist’s skill, derisively repeats everything that Brooke says. As George Eliot writes, ‘the most innocent echo has an impish mockery in it when it follows a gravely persistent speaker, and this echo was not at all innocent’; the crowd is amused, Brooke humiliated, and his political opponents score a victory (Eliot, 1988:413). I take this as an exemplary instance of parody, albeit a fictional one. By the mere repetition of another’s words, their intonation exaggerated but their substance remaining the same, one utterance, Brooke’s, is transformed by another, held up to public gaze, and subjected to ridicule.
