George Eliot\'s Counterpublics

Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze. “George Eliot’s Counterpublics.” Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, Seminar for Victorian Literature and Culture. Cambridge, MA. December 2013. Abstract This talk works through some of the different ways that George Eliot complicates dominant Victorian conceptions of community and belonging through her varied narrative representations of intimacy and affect. I will begin with a brief discussion of how intimacy and affect operate in relation to nineteenth-century realism; then I will explore some of the ways in which the Victorian ideal of an imagined sympathetic community works as an aspirational Victorian narrative of intimate belonging, and how in Eliot’s hands this ideal community works as a potential counter-narrative of intimacy, making space for less-conventional intimacies, like the one she shared with G.H. Lewes. I will briefly trace a connection between imagined sympathetic community and Eliot’s participation in a range of unconventional families and strangercommunities in order to highlight the subtly rendered, but important counterpublic in Middlemarch, comprised of Will Ladislaw, Mr. Farebrother’s odd sister, Miss Noble, and a group of young, lower-class children.

George Eliot’s Counterpublics Today, as in the nineteenth century, intimacy has everything to do with the inside, and that extends to interior spaces, the inner life, and even the internal organs. Something is intimate if it “pertain[s] to or [is] connected with the inmost nature or fundamental character of a thing.” 1 In other words it is “essential” or “intrinsic.” Intimacy also pertains to different personal relations, like friends or family, and to one’s status within a community. With its affect-heavy investment in social belonging, knowledge, and access to the inner circle, “intimacy” creates a nexus of multiple communities, interpersonal relationships, and feelings of recognition (or failed recognition). As recent work on intimacy demonstrates, life is saturated with contradictory intimacies and desires, the effects of which Lauren Berlant argues are “mainly [...] seen not as intimacy but as a danger to it” (Intimacy 5). 2 These ambiguous, often contradictory intimacies comprise the affective richness and complexity of social relations that, according to many scholars of realism, the nineteenth-century realist novel was at pains to represent.

Thorndike-Breeze, “George Eliot’s Counterpublics” My current project seeks to bridge studies of realism and recent work on intimacy and affect theory. I will begin with a brief discussion of how intimacy and affect operate in relation to nineteenth-century realism; then I will explore some of the ways in which the Victorian ideal of an imagined sympathetic community works as an aspirational Victorian narrative of intimate belonging, and how in Eliot’s hands this ideal community works as a potential counter-narrative of intimacy, making space for less-conventional intimacies, like the one she shared with G.H. Lewes. I will briefly trace a connection between imagined sympathetic community and Eliot’s participation in a range of unconventional families and stranger-communities in order to highlight the subtly rendered, but important counterpublic in Middlemarch, comprised of Will Ladislaw, Mr. Farebrother’s odd sister, Miss Noble, and a group of young, lower-class children. Affect, Realism, Intimacy In the recently published Affect Theory Reader, editors Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg relate their attempts to define the field of affect theory to taking an “inventory of shimmers,” and their complex definition of “affect” is itself framed by what they call “inbetween-ness.” 3 Affect mediates and penetrates relationships, communities, and the spaces between bodies, but it is elusive. Like affect and the intimate, realism is also deeply invested in the spaces between individuals and the worlds they live in, as well as in representing the multiple and often ineffable nuances of everyday life. Realism is “a mixed and elusive concept,” in Caroline Levine’s words, “better understood as a series of overlapping currents than as a coherent style or movement.” 4 A mode famous for its association with the empirical lenses of the microscope and the telescope, its “mixed and elusive” representations of intimate affects, personal relations, and modes of social belonging refract both the close-up and the wide-angled views of life into a multiplicity of intimacies.

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Thorndike-Breeze, “George Eliot’s Counterpublics” George Eliot and her fellow realist authors were transfixed by both the ethics of knowing and the ethics of sympathy, and they made metaphorical use of empirical lenses in their fiction to explore the intimate relationships among knowing, feeling, and promoting social good. 5 As George Levine illustrates in his recent essay collection, Realism, Ethics, and Secularism, these concerns called for the increased observation and representation of everything, and they responded to a “fundamental moral/aesthetic drive to find a way to move beyond the narrow limits of individual consciousness into a sympathetic and empathic relation to others, to the notself.” 6 As Eliot responded to that drive to know “the not-self” she “thrust the reader into an intimacy with possibilities well beyond the limits of the self who reads.” 7 Further, like many of her fellow Victorian intellectuals and novelists, Eliot upheld the stranger-community of sympathetic feeling as an aspirational narrative of intimate belonging – a kind of intimacy narrative that Lauren Berlant describes as an “aspiration for a narrative about something shared … that will turn out in a particular way.” 8 As Rae Greiner explains, Victorians thought that this sympathetic community, though “fictive,” cared for its members from a safe, anonymous distance, and “underwr[ote] ordinary life” with the assumption that the social world was comprised of individuals “mov[ing], think[ing], and behav[ing] generally as [one] expects them to do.” 9 For a woman to whom much of conventional social community was closed, this detached, sympathetic stranger-community likely provided a fulfilling alternative to conventional social belonging. 10 But Eliot’s difficult stance toward conventional belonging was not exclusively imposed by society. As her biographers illustrate, her association with a variety of intellectual communities was characterized by a wish for intimacy that resists conventional social practice. Lynn Voskuil suggests that “we should think of Eliot’s contemporaries not only as the friends and family she knew personally but also as the many people whose books she read and

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Thorndike-Breeze, “George Eliot’s Counterpublics” whose ideas she carefully weighed and considered.” 11 Thus, Eliot began to participate in intellectual stranger-communities very early in life. Intimacy with Strangers As her skepticism of Christianity increased through her reading of such works as David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1835-6), Charles Hennell’s An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of Christianity (1838), and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), she also developed new ideas about the worth of belonging to intellectual communities outside of conventional social frameworks. In Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner explains that detached publics comprised of strangers who are connected by a network of publications and correspondence “enable a way of being public through critical discourse” that “set a higher standard of reason, opinion, and freedom.” 12 Eliot nurtured her new ideas within a new progressive circle of friends, which eventually came to include Charles Hennell through his sisters, Sarah Hennell and Cara Bray. The Hennells and the Brays in turn introduced Eliot to John Chapman, who would publish her Strauss translation and hire her as the editor of the radical Westminster Review. As she became intimately acquainted with the works of such authors as T.H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Harriet Martineau, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Richard Owen through her role as editor, she also deepened her intimacy with the radical community. 13 As Voskuil tells us, she “became friends with many of [these intellectuals] and probably the lover of a few — and never stopped reading and discussing current ideas and philosophies.” 14 For a time Eliot was “the administrative and editorial center of the radical community,” a network of intellectuals that stretched far beyond her social circle. 15 But, as we know, once she and G.H. Lewes chose to live together against custom Eliot’s share in that radical social network narrowed substantially; though Lewes could continue to circulate socially among his community

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Thorndike-Breeze, “George Eliot’s Counterpublics” of intellectuals, Eliot and Lewes had to conduct their public life as a couple exclusively in the private sphere. Priory: Private Counterpublic Gathered at home, Eliot, Lewes, and their fellow intellectuals comprised an occasional counterpublic which would eventually become their famous “Sundays at the Priory,” where the men of their intellectual circle would gather, but rarely the women. A counterpublic, according to Warner, operates in “tension with a larger public”; its members “are marked off from persons or citizens in general.” 16 The interests and discussions “within such a public [are] understood to contravene the rules obtaining in the world at large…. It maintains, at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status.” 17 Though Eliot’s intellectual communities considered themselves to be superior to regular citizens, when these (mostly male) intellectuals gathered at Eliot’s home they acknowledged the subordinate status of their intimacy as a group. Such gatherings, after all, could never include Eliot outside of her home, and only those Victorian women “‘emancipée [enough…] not to mind what the world says about them […] or [with] no social position to maintain” would dare attend. 18 Until her literary innovations grew too impressive to be denied, in most publics George Eliot was first and foremost a fallen woman. Middlemarch is widely agreed to be the apotheosis of these innovations, and the novel includes several different intellectual stranger-communities similar Eliot’s own. Through its representations of Casaubon’s, Lydgate’s, and Farebrother’s relationships with their intellectual communities, the novel dramatizes some key ingredients of Eliot’s intimate partnership with G.H. Lewes. Their intimacy was too unconventional to represent in fiction, not least because Eliot considered herself and her “dual solitude” with Lewes to be exceptional and idiosyncratic compared to her fellow men and women. 19 But Casaubon’s, Lydgate’s, and Farebrother’s long-

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Thorndike-Breeze, “George Eliot’s Counterpublics” distance intellectual communities in Middlemarch do represent the core of Eliot’s and Lewes’s intimacy. Their mutual dedication to persistent study and involvement in intellectual community anchored their intimacy, and though she chose not to represent relationships like theirs in Middlemarch, Eliot does offer a radical vision for the future of intimacy. She presents a variation on the ideal sympathetic community in her depiction of Will Ladislaw’s counterpublic, which is comprised of himself, a group of very young lower-class children, and Mr. Farebrother’s odd sister, Miss Noble. Ladislaw’s Counterpublic: Radical Intimacy Throughout Middlemarch, Eliot demonstrates the inextricability of her sympathetic mission with inchoate, often contradictory intimacies and affective consequences. The novel’s virtuoso changes between telescopic and microscopic perspective not only help her to create representations both of historically-situated social frameworks and the sundry and minute intimations of “that roar which lies on the other side of silence,” but these narrative innovations also showcase the “inventory of shimmers” that comprise affective life. 20 As I have argued, Eliot’s experience of intimate belonging in radical communities, not to mention the radical intimacy she shared with G.H. Lewes, enhanced her awareness of the fraught complexity both of the inner life and of a broad range of intimacies. With regard to intimacy as a sense of belonging, numerous scholars have written on Eliot’s views of community, particularly the different virtues she associated with close-knit domestic communities on the one hand and the detached cultivation of sympathetic community on the other. 21 Daniel S. Malachuk underscores Eliot's investment in a society made up of individuals attempting to cultivate their own “moral sense[s],” and argues that in her fiction she “proposes a set of liberal practices” that treat the oikos – that is, the sphere of the household and family, what Hannah Arendt calls “the sphere of

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Thorndike-Breeze, “George Eliot’s Counterpublics” ‘necessity’ opposite the polis’s ‘freedom,’” – as “the key domain” in which the “unhistoric acts” of individuals can combine to improve society. 22 In other words, the political agency of sympathetic community is not found in its capacity as a stranger-community, but rather in the deepened sense of belonging that sympathy offers tightly-knit groups – though not necessarily within traditional families. Eliot creates a counter-model of familial belonging that combines the powers of sympathy and oikos in her depiction of Will Ladislaw’s counterpublic of misfits. As she does so, Eliot laces the dominant plots of Middlemarch with a radical counter-narrative of intimacy. In chapter 46, in the context of the “new political animation” brought on by Parliamentary debates over the Reform Bill, Eliot conveys the intimate depths of Ladislaw’s radicalism through a description of his unconventional relationships: He had somehow picked up a troop of droll children, little hatless boys with their galligaskin much worn and scant shirting to hang out, little girls who tossed their hair out of their eyes to look at him, and guardian brothers at the mature age of seven. This troop he had led out on gypsy excursions to Halsell wood at nutting-time, and since the cold weather had set in he had taken them on a clear day to gather sticks for a bonfire in the hollow of a hillside, where he drew out a small feast of gingerbread for them, and improvised a Punchand-Judy drama with some private home-made puppets. 23 This brief sketch of woodland outings combines Romantic reverence for the child and the equally Romantic belief in nature as the realm of oikos for alternative communities. 24 We can contrast this with another Romantic scene of natural community: in the context of the scene late in the novel, in which Dorothea is inspired by the scene outside her bow window of anonymous laborers working in the fields, Malachuk argues that Eliot invokes the Romantic

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Thorndike-Breeze, “George Eliot’s Counterpublics” conception of pastoral oikos and links “civic virtue [with] the ‘beauteous order’” of the natural world. 25 However, in Dorothea’s scene oikos is only present in her mind, and only for a moment. Instead, I argue that Ladislaw's frequent excursions into woodland and meadow with this band of children gives Dorothea’s ideal of civic virtue both physicality and agency. The vitality and joy of their “gypsy excursions,” “bonfire[s],” and puppet shows performed with “private home-made puppets” contrasts with Dorothea’s abstract sense of sympathy for the anonymous laborers on her estate. Though all of its lower-class members are also anonymous, Ladislaw’s community is defined by closeness and attachment that cannot be obtained through boudoir contemplation, even when one has a lovely bow window to gaze through. This Romantic band of wanderers suggests an alternative way to belong that confounds the conventional public practice in the town of Middlemarch. The short list of community gatherings sketches a basic framework for a largely unknown system of relationality. Here, Eliot offers a counter-narrative of intimate community that works behind the scenes. Further, the inclusion of Miss Noble in this community connects this counterpublic to the broader network of Middlemarch and thus lends other more conventional intimacies a radical cast. Throughout the novel, Miss Noble’s presence provides a charming disturbance of typical social relations. Her own social relations are frequently characterized in animal-terms that emphasize the intensity of her intimate and affective attachments. She often communicates through “beaver-like noises”; her sister compares her to a dog who would take Will’s “shoes for a pillow,” she is so devoted; and she enjoys squirreling away morsels from the dinner table to share with the poor families she visits in the background while the primary characters of Middlemarch contend with paranoid husbands, extravagant wives, and greedy ex-partners. 26 Miss Noble connects “gypsy” idylls and the largely invisible community of Middlemarch poor to her own family; in turn, her brother, the

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Thorndike-Breeze, “George Eliot’s Counterpublics” Reverend Farebrother, connects Miss Noble to the entire social network of the town and its surrounding estates. Finally, it is Miss Noble who brings Ladislaw and Dorothea together in their final tête-à-tête. Thus, Miss Noble marks the conventional telos of their courtship with the strange intimacies of her counterpublic. Ladislaw’s and Miss Noble’s relationships with each other and with the band of “droll children” create an undercurrent of ambiguous relationality in the novel, and thus quietly – perhaps also with little beaver-like noises – call its conventional narratives of intimacy and community into question, and bring into focus numerous other contradictory intimacies that pervade even the most ordinary lives. Though this intimate counternarrative works subtly throughout the novel, it highlights one of the driving forces behind Eliot’s writing: relationships and ways of belonging that confound conventional narratives of intimacy – like Eliot’s and G.H. Lewes’s radical intimacy – are no less mixed or elusive than any number of “ordinary” experiences. As she represents life through the figurative interplay of telescopic and microscopic lenses, Eliot’s realism demonstrates the affective richness and intensity of the everyday.

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Thorndike-Breeze, “George Eliot’s Counterpublics”

Notes 1. “Intimate, Adj. and N.,” OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, June 2013), accessed August 20, 2013, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/98506. The noun form of “intimate” refers to those who “intimately belong to something,” and likewise “intimacy” is defined as “the quality or condition of being intimate,” either with objects of study or in social relations. See “Intimacy, N.,” OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press), accessed April 18, 2014, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/98503. 2. See also Christopher Lane. The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis & Victorian Masculinity. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 9-10. 3. Gregory J. Seigworth, and Melissa Gregg. "An Inventory of Shimmers, " in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press Books, 2010), 1. 4. Caroline Levine, “Surprising Realism,” in A Companion to George Eliot, edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 62. 5. For recent critical perspectives on realism, see Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality : Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Matthew Beaumont, ed., Adventures in Realism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007) ; Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (Yale University Press, 2008); Rachel Bowlby, “Two Interventions on Realism: Untold Stories in Mrs Dalloway; Versions of Realism in George Eliot’s Adam Bede,” Textual Practice 25, no. 3 (June 2011), doi:10.1080/0950236X.2011.571528; and Rae Greiner, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 6. George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge University Press, 2012), viii. 7. Ibid. 8. Berlant, Intimacy, 1; on the relation of intimacy to “fantasies of the good life,” see also Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) 3. 9. Greiner, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, 9–10. 10. On Eliot’s embrace of isolation in tension with her belief in sympathy, see John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 119.

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Thorndike-Breeze, “George Eliot’s Counterpublics”

11. Lynn Voskuil, “George Eliot among Her Contemporaries: A Life Apart,” in A Companion to George Eliot, edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 235. 12. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2005), 45-6. 13. Voskuil, 238-9. 14. Ibid., 239. 15. Ibid. 16. Warner, 56. 17. Ibid. 18. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 1968), 409. See also Voskuil, 240. 19. Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters. Vol.3. 1859-1861 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 460. 20. Ibid., 182; Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 1. 21. For example, see Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community : A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 22. Daniel S. Malachuk, “George Eliot’s Liberalism,” edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, in A Companion to George Eliot. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 371. 23. Ibid., 431, 435. 24. Malachuk. “George Eliot’s Liberalism,” 376. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 757, 738.

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