George Eliot came to appreciate the social and moral functions of religion; she is hard on her characters when they turn from their roots. For the rejection of her Jewish heritage Daniel Deronda’s mother is emotionally blighted and called to a reckoning.
But George Eliot herself—in a good instance of what feminist critics see as her denying her female characters her own options—never wavered in her essential loss of religious belief. A pronouncement in one of her letters has always appealed to me. As she writes in 1860 to Barbara Bodichon:
I have faith in the working out of higher possibilities than the Catholic or any other church has presented, and those who have strength to wait and endure, are bound to accept no formula which their whole souls—their intellect as well as their emotions—do not embrace with entire reverence. The highest “calling and election” is to do without opium and live through all our pain with conscious clear-eyed endurance.
The last sentence in particular I find rousing. “The highest ‘calling and election’ is to do without opium and live through all our pain with conscious clear-eyed endurance.” I often quote this, both to students and to friends or simply intone it to myself. The directive seems both stoic and existential.
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I COME BACK TO the important point of George Eliot’s being a moralist. As such she is enshrined in F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition, the work I have alluded to several times that locates the strength of the English novel in its moral preoccupation—an urgent and serious interest in how we live. Leavis, as I’ve said, gives short shift to the Brontës, while Eliot is one of three central figures in his pantheon, the other two being Conrad and James. I don’t agree with Leavis about throwing out the whole Jewish half of Daniel Deronda. For me, that would leave a less interesting work. But when he assesses George Eliot as “a peculiarly fortifying . . . author, and a suggestive one” for our times, I am led to think of all the ways, both specific and diffuse, that this nineteenth-century novelist has helped to shape my twentieth- and twenty-first-century life.
George Eliot’s novels, as I have tried to show, emphasize the importance of roots and of community. “Pity that Offendene was not the home of Miss Harleth’s childhood, or endeared to her by family memories!” she begins Chapter 3 of Daniel Deronda. “A human life, I think, should be well-rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth. . . .” The passage is a long one, stressing the benefit to the soul of attachment even to one’s first dogs. I actually had beloved early dogs, I had a cherished home, my childhood home in Beverly Hills. And if my mother declared, following the example of Napoleon, “I am my own ancestor,” she was mine, and our home and family milieu provided my first community.
In this home I learned many lessons—how to enter the world, how to be brave, how to make something of myself, how to be both irreverent and honorable, how to have fun, even how to be connected to other people. But spending four years working on the novels of George Eliot shifted my earlier ambitions, which like Gwendolyn’s were only in the vaguest kind of way to be “great” while worrying that I was really insufficient. George Eliot teaches the lesson of overcoming excessive ego, of putting community before the self, of making a contribution, of making others glad they were born, if that’s not carrying it too far. I’m not saying I consciously assented to this lesson—rather, I sought intellectually to deconstruct it. But I also see that it’s a powerful—and beneficial—lesson I am pleased to have at least in part absorbed.
I feel fortunate that I have had the opportunity to be a teacher. The profession is one in which I’ve been able to develop an ideal of service—subsuming ego, harnessing my Gwendolyn Harleth-like delight in self display to serve literature and, I hope, most of all, to serve the students. It’s true that the years at the University of Hawaii were compartmentalized, as I sat on my lanai, only cursorily involved with Hawaiian culture, writing about George Eliot day after day. Yet it was also in Hawaii, now over forty years ago, that I became a full-fledged university teacher, first sharing with students my beloved nineteenth-century novels in the general education courses I was assigned to teach. Of course, the curriculum was Western—no one thought to question this, though students of Japanese, Chinese, Philippine, and Hawaiian origin filled the classroom. One day discussing the setting and metaphor of bad weather in Wuthering Heights, I did have a sudden awareness of my students’ attire—sleeveless cutoff shirts and shorts. How many of you have ever seen snow? I asked, and we had a good open discussion about cultural differences before returning more strictly to the syllabus.
Teaching in a college setting can give a sense of belonging to what, as I have mentioned, Raymond Williams calls a “knowable community.” After my time in Hawaii, I have entered communities at Bowdoin College in Maine, Barnard College in New York, and Hollins College in Virginia. In each of these I participated, richly, but I also moved on, still restless, not quite rooted—still, if it’s not too fanciful a conceit, living through my
