herself the rudiments of political economy; her laissez-faire uncle Mr. Brooke knows the terms but ignores the practice, letting his estate and tenants suffer from his parsimony even while he accepts the liberal Will Ladislaw as his political agent. Will, the outsider, eventually becomes an active member of Parliament, working to better the social system. Not only are the characters compared to each other but the book compares itself with epic and with spiritual journey, reaches toward them, and eschews them in the interest of a purely human level of analysis (no - 451- gods, no God, just people). Ironies are activated by these multiple (and multiplied) comparisons. Yet at the same time the reader is invited to participate intimately in the experience of one after another of the characters.
That intimacy is produced to a considerable degree by language of the body. People are, in George Eliot's words, 'incarnate history.' One of the worst things that can happen to a human person is the disjunction between theory and replenishing life, a fate she describes with extraordinary imagistic intensity as Dorothea weighs the burden that the dead Casaubon has placed upon her: to continue his ill-conceived work, preparing materials, 'sorting them as food for a theory which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child.' Here the images of food and stillbirth are locked painfully against each other, theory become a withered changeling. Dorothea refuses her dead husband's injunction and redeems her own youth.
Far more than has been acknowledged by much twentieth-century criticism, the body becomes the nexus of meaning in George Eliot's discourse. Many of her contemporaries, sharing the same discursive register, responded to the physicality of her writing. Some even felt an indelicacy in her intimate description, particularly the impropriety of a woman representing 'the bodily feelings of the other sex' (and, perhaps here, the alarm at finding men the 'other sex.')
But physical passion in George Eliot's novels is most often realized in loss, not presence. Her women, in particular, know the intensity of their love as they renounce it. The moment of sacrifice rather than of rapture is the typical form of awakening in her works. Repression itself becomes a form of desire. This is particularly striking in The Mill on the Floss where Maggie's ardent nature declares itself after childhood by a series of turnings away from fulfillment. Her yearning toward self-sacrifice, which is quizzically presented in the descriptions of her adolescent religious pietism, seems to be endorsed by the book's own later activity, which drives her first toward and then away from her passionate love for Stephen Guest. In Middlemarch Dorothea arrives at the moment of renunciation (though, in this book, mutual love is at last allowed its sway and Dorothea's willingness for martyrdom is surpassed in the coming together of herself and Will at last).
George Eliot's own contemporaries were much fascinated by her body, and particularly by the imputed cross-gender characteristics of her countenance. Henry James's account of George Eliot's appearance -452- on his first encounter with her seems imbued with his earlier reading of her work. In a letter to his father, after an account of her physical plainness he swings theatrically to the other extreme:
A mingled sagacity and sweetness-a broad hint of a great underlying world of reserve, knowledge, pride, and power-a great feminine dignity and character in these massively plain features-a hundred conflicting shades of consciousness and simpleness-shyness and frankness-graciousness and remote indifference.-these are some of the more definite elements of her personality.
The emphasis on range and on swerves and secrecy, as well as on 'plainness,' form a critique of George Eliot's prose as much as of her body. The two are seen as somehow implicated in each other in James's description. (James arrived unexpectedly at a crisis moment during the fatal illness of Thornie, George Henry Lewes's son, so that the intensity and the reserve may have been a response to an awkward visit.)
Any account of the intellectual pressures in George Eliot's work must register the extent to which those pressures have become inseparable from the energies of daily life. It is not enough to speak of «background» or «context»; rather, ideas become condensed as event, person, commentary, dialogue. The uneasy accord among these various elements of the fiction is freighted with irreconcilable perceptions. That is to say, the ideas that George Eliot thinks with are there in the relations of the text, rather than always spelled out referentially. Indeed, ideas are implicit in the activity of the book's structure as well as in its language. One phenomenon that this produces is the multiplicity of systems that varying readers can draw out of a single passage, so that according to each one's own current preoccupation Darwin or Mill, or Anna Jameson, or Hans Andersen or Spencer can be brought to the surface (all these, and more, are active in the one-and-a-half-page prelude to Middlemarch).
Yet the text's vibration does not produce a deconstructive freedom for the reader. Not everything here lies level; some areas of the text continue to resist open interpretation. Precisely in that aspect of the text where Eliot seems most to register the presence of the reader, in those extranarrative swerves into second person plural (the «we» of her wooing voice directed toward us) are to be found the most determined areas of the fiction. The text will not budge, will not yield itself to counterinterpretation or unraveling here. A reader may refuse to cooperate, may resist the suggestion that inevitably we must recognize what is proposed to us as true of behavior beyond the fiction, true to each our own behav-453- ior. But to do so requires disengagement from the text. There is menace as well as sympathy in the predicament this creates for the refusing reader: it threatens to expose an ethical inadequacy in that very act of refusal, or to drive us into an extratextual realm whose existence it denies.
So the question of authority is renewed. Many critics have noted that Eliot tends to avoid scenes of confrontation in her work and that when in the early work, as in Adam Bede, they do occur, they tend to be highly stylized and masculine. Much later such scenes occur in a rather different temper: between Dorothea and Rosamond, between Gwendolen and Grandcourt's cast-off lover, the mother of his children, between Daniel and his long-lost mother who does not wish to become a nurturing mother again. In each of these cases at least one of the participants is deeply uneasy about the encounter. But in the actual writing of her novels Eliot persistently shifts register within a sentence, skirmishes with asides and ironies, mounts into metaphor. This is a far more flexible way of indicating conflict and demurring at certainties than imposing binary oppositions. In 'Notes on Form in Art' Eliot commments, 'Fundamentally, form is unlikeness.' George Eliot's dialogue does not have the electrifying cogency of Jane Austen's, but the conversations articulate difference and leave room for the unsaid, as in Mrs. Poyser's conversation, or the talk between the sisters Dorothea and Celia or the children Maggie and Tom, or in the anguished tug of need between Gwendolen and Deronda. The multiplicity of positions brings authority into play so that the reader is often left uncertain as to the provenance of insights and opinions even while assenting to their (conflicting) claims.
The chancy, the circumstantial, the improbable coincidence-all are given key roles in Eliot's perceptions: Silas is driven out of his first community by the lot declaring him to have stolen funds, and the child Eppie toddles into his cottage while his consciousness is suspended in a fit; Daniel Deronda opens with Gwendolen in the gambling hall, losing at play, and ends with Deronda setting out for an unknown country (an as yet nonexistent country) to which he is bound by the hazard of his genetic inheritance. His is a chosen quest, but full of risk.
The multiplicity of systems at work and their convergence in each different center of human consciousness makes for chance in Eliot's work. She draws here on probability theory and on the then-current writing of the astronomer Richard Proctor, the logician John Venn, and the mathematician W. K. Clifford, which G. H. Lewes also used, — 454- emphasizing the unsoundness of prediction and induction. The reader, also, is alerted to an improbably high number of circumstances by the action of her fiction, and is made preternaturally aware. Above all, in her ordering of plot, George Eliot draws on her intense response to individuation. Each person is 'incarnate history'-none alike. In the abstracted language of her 'Notes on Form in Art,' human beings set in historical conditions are examples of 'the most varied group of relations bound together in a wholeness which again has the most varied relations with all other phenomena.' Within the novels that perception may become a country town, St. Oggs or Middlemarch; it may equally become each one of the town's inhabitants. Coincidence in her novels is not simply a ruse of the novelist but a reminder of the multivalency of the world, visible when attention is fully aroused.
