ABSTRACT
Balzac’s description of his project and his realist’s assertion of its typicality may be expressed in characteristically hyperbolic terms, but there is some affinity here with George Eliot’s choice of an unprepossessing provincial clergyman as the subject of her first story, ‘a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace’ (5, 80). Indeed, in defending the ordinariness of her protagonist, George Eliot as narrator defines a category of person among whom Balzac’s hero clearly belongs, for, in his upright determination to pay his creditors in full, the bankrupt Birotteau could be described as precisely one of those ‘commonplace people’ who ‘bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right’ (5, 81). The contours of amos Barton’s experience are less dramatic than César Birotteau’s, but the pattern of rise and fall is, on the other hand, one of the features of the life of provincial society as she is later to define it in Midddlemarch, even though her emphasis falls on subtler changes:
The ‘less marked vicissitudes’ are the ones that claim her attention as the stuff of quiet provincial life, and although they may be at some remove from César Birotteau’s ‘grandeur and decadence’, they correspond quite closely to the generalization that Balzac attaches to his story: ‘those vicissitudes of bourgeois life that no voice has dreamt of writing about, so much are they denuded of grandeur’. But there is an important difference. George Eliot’s vision of provincial life may be acutely attentive to fine distinctions of rank and fortune, and it can be sharply satirical,3 but it is not articulated in the class terms that Balzac employs with his reference to ‘bourgeois life’. as Tim Dolin has argued, she is wary of class and
the language of social description that refers to it.4 Her understanding of social life is thus at odds with Balzac’s insight into the conflicts and contradictions of a specifically bourgeois society, and, indeed, her habit of placing her fiction back a few decades into the past has the effect of allowing her to avoid some of the pressing class issues of modernity and to keep ‘the vocabulary of class at one remove’.5 This is one indication of how the two novelists may be mining the same ground but doing so in interestingly different ways. as George Eliot sets out on her career as a novelist, Balzac is an important predecessor and her fiction shows some traces of her reading of his work. Those traces suggest a form of creative dialogue in which she defines herself not by following his example but by diverging from it, taking similar material and giving it her own distinctive inflection. To read the two writers side by side is to encounter moments of interaction when the characteristic features of George Eliot’s fiction are thrown into relief largely by contrast with Balzac, though with some elements of intriguing affinity.
