issues within the early novels (though the gypsy episode in The Mill hints at some of the problems), but in her later work she more and more explores the position of the incomer and the racial other.
She recognizes that nationalism is not a matter only of sovereign boundaries. It may be as active in small enclosed communities. Indeed, Silas Marner is the first of her works where the plot is organized about an exile. Silas, the linen-weaver, is one of the scattered 'emigrants from the town into the country,' one of 'certain pallid undersized men, who, — 447- by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.' Ironically, as well as being a 'remnant of a disinherited race' Silas is also a harbinger of the industrial future, working at the mercy of the demands of his loom. In Silas Marner Silas is eventually assimilated into the country community. In her later work no such complete accord is possible-and even in Silas Marner she has recourse to the terms of dream and fairy tale to make the possibility seem authentic. Silas learns skills across gender. Lost gold becomes a child's golden curls, and Silas's maternal nurturing of the lost little girl Eppie proves to be his way into full life. But a very tight piece of plotting is necessary to sustain the delicate balance between dream, wish fulfillment, and hard-headed social commentary that distinguishes this short book.
The other medium of interpretation in Silas Marner is gossip, particularly the ritual repetition of founding stories within the village community. Mr. Macey, in particular, tells repeated stories about meaning, function, and intention, which George Eliot carefully avoids overinterpreting, as in the tale of the couple whom the clergyman marries with gender-crossing words: ''Wilt thou have this man to be thy wedded wife? says he, and then he says, 'Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded husband? says he.' Here, above all, George Eliot represents the robust variety within a community by means of conversation; the speech rhythms as well as the actual dialect words insist on the inner coherence of the group.
It is the last occasion on which she represents an indigenous English community as worth assimilating to. Even the town of Middlemarch, though it provides material for a major novel, is surveyed skeptically. The town's own assurance that it is at the center, or middle, of the world is offset in a number of ways: by the book's concern with systems and ideas beyond the mediocre conversation of the town's settled inhabitants, by allusion to those capital cities London, Paris, and Rome-dwindled beside the linguistic and material bulk of Middlemarch in the foreground-and by the fact that many of those with whom the reader is concerned prove to be incomers (Casaubon, Lydgate, Bulstrode, Ladislaw, Dorothea, and Celia, to say nothing of Raffles and Rigg). Moreover, many of those incomers central to the reader's concerns leave the place again, by death, default, or social exclusion. The «coherence» of Middlemarch the town is a narrative sleight of hand: the various figures whom the reader perceives as intimately connected by the analo-448- gies and disanalogies between their lives scarcely know each other across the class barriers of the place. Some of them come also from irremediably far away.
Ladislaw in Middlemarch is described by gossip as 'the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker' and 'an Italian with white mice' (his grandfather was 'a Polish refugee who gave lessons for his bread'). In the communal mind of 'that part of the world that lay within park palings'-that is, the English landed gentry-all «foreigners» are held to be about equally contemptible and hence interchangeable. That Will's parentage is partly of that world counts not at all in the estimation of their neighbors. When Dorothea marries Will Ladislaw she aligns herself with a world outside the general prejudices of her class. He becomes eventually a reforming member of Parliament, helping to change settled, self-contented England-how, we do not know.
By the time she wrote Daniel Deronda George Eliot's concern with the damaging effects of British supremacism had become a motive force of the novel: in particular, the novel explores the imaginative debility of the English and its effects on national life and intimate experience alike. Eliot's own friendship with Emanuel Deutsch, scholar of the Near East, and himself born the son of a rabbi in Silesia, opened up further ranges of insight and inquiry. Deutsch's 1867 article on 'The Talmud' in the Quarterly Review had excited very widespread interest and had drawn into the awareness of many English people for the first time the parallels between diverse religions, including Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity. George Eliot's imagination was fired by Deutsch's writing and by his friendship. Writing to Harriet Beecher Stowe ten years later, after the novel had been published, she observed: 'Moreover, not only towards the Jews, but towards all oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace to us.'
Her late works more and more directly explore this 'national disgrace.' Fedalma in The Spanish Gypsy and, above all, Daniel in Daniel Deronda suggest how even those brought up, like Fedalma and Daniel, in the privileged midst of a dominant society may, in the end, be driven to reassert their difference. Each of them discovers their identification with an ethnic group demeaned by their foster society: gypsy and Jew. Each discovers a lost parent.
This is not to say that George Eliot always explores these questions of ethnicity and Orientalism along lines the present-day reader might -449- expect or favor. In Felix Holt the dead wife of Harold Transome, whom he married in Smyrna where he worked as a banker after a spell in the British Embassy in Constantinople, is presented as a mere slave, at home in the harem of his dominance. But part of the point of that representation is to suggest how Mrs. Transome, the English conservative lady, adamant, self-aware, dignified, and privileged, is equally enslaved, equally at the mercy of terrors and lost eroticism. She fears both the men in her life, her son Harold and her long-ago lover, Jermyn, still the lawyer for the estate.
The secret that she carries within her-that Harold is Jermyn's illegitimate son-is like an unending pregnancy that burdens and constrains her every act. She chafes for independence, but the book opens already with the end of her mastery. She is no longer to have command of the estate that she has efficiently maintained during Harold's long absence abroad. She is to become again a woman enclosed and useless, as surely as Harold's wife has been in her haremlike sensibility. The notion that it is only Eastern potentates who enslave women (a popular self-gratifying view among Victorian and later Englishmen) is here shrewdly undermined. Yet the very fixture of Mrs. Transome's plight means that George Eliot can pursue it only so far. Mrs. Transome then recedes into the background, forming an immanent warning for both the reader and Esther of the impasse that women who dread men are locked within.
Whereas Mrs. Transome and Harold are each incapable of change, Felix and Esther begin to educate each other. George Eliot's own interest in issues of colonialism and imperialism is illustrated by the fact that the day after she sent off the manuscript of 'Felix Holt's Address to Working-Men' (the very gradualist rather than radical tailpiece she wrote a year after the novel) she spent eight hours in the gallery of the House of Commons listening to the debate on Abyssinia. The outcome of the policy then being pursued was the assertion of British imperialism in Africa. During the years between Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda Eliot's reading in anthropology, history, and sociology, and her concern with current issues, had prepared her for a more investigative treatment of British power relations within and beyond the borders of the island.
Questions of gender and questions of cultural and national supremacism converge in her writing, often with a turn of humor that taxes the reader unawares. Felix Holt was written during the period leading up to -450- the 1867 Reform Act, and while writing it George Eliot went through 'the Times of 1832 -33 at the British Museum, to be sure of as many details as I could.' As she was to do again with greater complexity in Middlemarch, George Eliot created a satirical superstructure to the novel, addressed to her contemporary readers, by matching the periods of the two major franchise laws alongside each other. It is worth remembering that George Eliot did not live or write in, or write for readers who lived in, what we would now consider a democracy.
Most of the characters in Middlemarch lack the vote, but they crowd in upon the reader's attention according to hierarchies other than the franchise, important though that is in the turn of the book's affairs. In Middlemarch the effect, as one reads, is of an extraordinary inclusiveness. Yet the novel is also defined by what is not in Middlemarch the town, or, indeed, in Middlemarch the work. The urban poor, religious fervor, family meals, death of loved people: none of these are present in this capacious novel. Those who die before the book's ending (Casaubon and Featherstone) are much regretted only by themselves. Their attempts to impose their wills after death are thwarted by the action of the book. Instead, the effect of abundance and of fine discriminations is produced by the subtlety with which the diverse experiences of the characters shift, check, and illuminate each other. They do not run parallel; no likeness is complete, no distance absolute. Casaubon and Lydgate both seek origins and each is asking the wrong question, but the nature of the answers they seek is diverse: Casaubon's a repetitious collapsing together of things only superficially alike, Lydgate's a fructifying search for what initiates difference in the structures of the body. The clergyman Farebrother is the amateur taxonomist, Lydgate the professional experimenter-yet Farebrother can analyze and participate in others' feelings as Lydgate can never do. Dorothea is trapped by her status as a lady; Rosamond aspires to that status and is trapped equally by that aspiration. Dorothea works out for
