SOURCE: Carroll, Alicia. “The Giaour's Campaign: Desire and the Other in Felix Holt, The Radical.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 30, no. 2 (winter 1997): 237-58.

[In the following essay, Carroll discusses Eliot's use of Orientalism in Felix Holt through the character of Harold Transome, who is neither English nor Eastern.]

I.

George Eliot's novels of “English life” often touch upon the outer limits of empire (Felix Holt 79). But in her hands, the English novel may be less engaged in redrawing contemporary imperialist plots than in challenging them. Featuring a heavily Byronic, Eastern exoticism or Orientalism in Felix Holt, The Radical, Eliot creates a dialogue between otherness and desire that is mediated through a presence which is neither fully English nor authentically Eastern.¹ In doing so, she complicates Victorian notions of race in provocative, unconventional ways. With its seductive British national, at once a bastard, a gentleman, a radical political candidate, and “an Oriental, you know” (194), the novel probes deeply into notions of national identity and desire, deconstructing appearances of Englishness and otherness, deliberately confusing and subverting those values which other Victorian novelists like Dickens or Thackeray hold sacred. The political and domestic questions the novel's Orientalism raises do not start from Edward Said's clean slate, where “positive ideas of home, of a nation and its language, of proper order, good behavior, moral values” set a standard by which others are measured (81). Instead, the moral values of Eliot's England are themselves apparently absent from all but the narrator's text. That narrator, a voice for an author who is herself an outsider in a complicated, often paradoxical sense, is itself in conflict about the morality of England's empire and the “English life” she represents.

Making the political candidate who is an object of the heroine's desire both an “Oriental” and a Byronic “Giaour,” Eliot's novel studies not just the English self's connection to a provincial community, but critically, the English self's connection to the wider, multicultural world. The heroine's attraction to her exotic suitor, Harold Transome, and to an English mythology of exoticism becomes a metaphor for the narrative drive toward the breaking of bonds with self and community, as well as toward their reinvention. Often literally and metaphorically savage, the cultural other becomes a repository of the violent energy involved in reform. Rich with a Turkish fortune, literally plump with Eastern luxury and a round, “brown” heir (491), Eliot's political candidate draws on Orientalist stereotypes, particularly those Eliot inherited from Byron's Oriental Tales. Desirous and acquisitive, he signals what Victorian imperialists might fear most in otherness, the desire for sexual and political autonomy unmitigated by English perceptions of morality and vocation.

In the novel, a literary genre which was by the nineteenth century “becoming increasingly committed to depicting only the normative bourgeois values of industry, sobriety, and chastity,” orientalizing rebellious figures “permitted the representation of … ‘transgressive’ moral values” (Leask 20). Certainly, Eliot's canon is replete with rebellious figures who are other in significant ways, strikingly dark like Eliot's Spanish gypsy, Fedalma, Maggie Tulliver, or Dorothea Brooke, half-caste or foreign like Daniel Deronda or Will Ladislaw. However, in Felix Holt, Eliot's Oriental is also an Englishman and an imperialist. A far cry from the cheerily English, unexamined plantation owner of Mansfield Park, he seems a conscious representation of the fact that “desire and moral scruple merge in this fascination with oriental luxury and its commodification in trade and literature” (Leask 21). In Eliot's novel, the slave-owning imperialist who calls himself an “Oriental” represents the British potential for tyranny. At home in the Midlands, in an English society dominated by philistinism, it is the landed native who is a barbarian. Paradoxically, Eliot's Oriental is a critique of Englishness.

A political opportunist, Harold Transome wages two campaigns in the novel, one to win Esther Lyon and one to win a seat in the House of Commons (541). As the political alter ego and romantic rival of Eliot's reticent, Arnoldian radical, Felix Holt, Transome provides another link between otherness and desire in Eliot's canon. Anticipating the problem of miscegenation, which is to become a central focus in Eliot's later works, Transome and his cloak of otherness seem a logical step towards Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Ultimately, the excoriation and final redemption of Harold Transome might say as much about the difficulties of reforming the prescribed plots of English domestic fiction as about radicalism, Toryism, or Whiggery.

Indeed, like Daniel Deronda, the miscegenationist romance plot of Felix Holt connects the problems of blood and race, and their metaphoric content of the self's conflict with community, to the plots of vocation and reform. As in Eliot's last great novel, her clean conservatism, or the “high mountain air” of her idea of reform, possesses a correspondent depravity, a “Red Deeps” of moral uncertainty (Mill on the Floss 391). In Felix Holt, those depths are reached through Harold Transome's moral position as a slave owner and empire builder, his illegitimacy and that of his child, Harry. In contrast to the Gothic or Northern-European superiority of Felix Holt and the heroine Esther Lyon's French-English, aristocratic delicacy of feature and frame, Transome, his father, Jermyn, and his child Harry are all posited as savage or of a lower order. However, as the products both of otherness and Englishness, the stereotypes in Felix Holt undermine rather than stabilize the English community. The Oriental here is as tainted by his identity as an imperialist Englishman as he is by his participation in barbaric Oriental custom; contamination comes from within.

Some readers have noted that the issue of reform in Felix Holt connects an individual's moral to his or her political awareness to such an extent that “family politics” reflect national politics (Gallagher 258).² But in Felix Holt, Eliot's notion of family extends beyond the national family of England, encompassing the Oriental within the colonial Englishman, and issues of race within the “family” of the English class system itself. The politics of race and class infiltrate the politics of Victorian national reform in the novel, much as they did in the career of Benjamin Disraeli in Victorian politics. Through its melange of historical and literary Oriental figures, racial stereotypes, and reform politics, Eliot's novel very deliberately calls into play questions about the moral axioms of Englishness in both the political and domestic spheres. As many critics have noticed, she does not satisfactorily answer them in the conservative Felix Holt, in which the willful heroine ends up married, chastened, and “punished” at novel's end.

Eliot's ideal England, her bright, organic, utopian community, then, has an underside that is often drawn in terms of race and class. Energized by sexual and political desire, the “brown, darting, determined lizard,” Harold Transome (98), like Caterina Sarti, Fedalma, Maggie Tulliver, Will Ladislaw, or Daniel Deronda, initiates the processes of reform and narrative progression in Eliot's canon. Torn herself between “disgust” and desire, Eliot's narrator depicts the lower realm such figures inhabit in paradoxical terms of repugnance and attraction. The lower realm in Felix Holt, of which Harold Transome is prince, is also the seat of sexual attraction, sensual pleasure, and temptation. Like Satan, Harold Transome is “far more interesting” than the rather hapless English Felix, whose angelic aescetism is partnered with a “belligerent pedantry” and a profound anti-sensualism, signaled mainly through his disapproval of Esther's taste for Byron (Thomson 110). Eliot is clearly intrigued by his presence and by that of his heir, the incomprehensible polyglot child, Harry. These forces, intruding roughly, savagely into the novel's Arnoldian scheme, are ones to be reckoned with, not tossed aside in the desire to create a “moral” George Eliot with a narrative voice devoid of any troubling paradoxes. Indeed, casting her candidate Harold Transome in the shape of Disraeli, who casts himself in the shape of the Orientalist Byron, Eliot displaces our concept of her morality and brings new moral questions to the study of her canon.³

II.

Empire is a literary as well as a political construct in Felix Holt and it owes its seductive, dangerous glamour to Byron. In the past, Eliot's narrator has been linked to Felix Holt's belief that, as a representative of moral depravity, Byron can only corrupt. The reading of Byron and the development of a specifically Byronic Orientalism become an important defiance of moral correctness in the novel, and linking Eliot's voice with Felix has contributed to the critical construction of an earnest, morally conservative, politically idealistic George Eliot. Throughout, the young Esther Lyon is seen reading Byron with pleasure and is severely condemned for doing so by the pedantic Felix. Echoing Carlyle, he insists that she put down her Byron and replace it with a more instructive text. The conflict is a significant one throughout the novel. Esther sacrifices her Byronic text, particularly its tales of “Oriental love” and its acute “invective,” when she marries Felix (541; Letters 1: 71). Again, hearing George Eliot in Felix Holt, critics have seen this rejection as firmly based in the biographical record. The mature George Eliot's distaste for Byron is plain for all to see in her letters. Equally plain, however, is the fact that the young Mary Ann Evans was herself a devotee of Byron and that, indeed, he was as much a favorite as Carlyle or Wordsworth. It was only after the 1869 exposure of Byron's incestuous relationship with his sister that Eliot began to deplore him. Written in 1867, Eliot's novel predates that shift. In her letters, the record of her attachment to Byron, especially her identification with his poetry, which was to continue up until the novelist began Middlemarch,⁴ suggests an entirely different reading of Felix Holt. Deeply interwoven in the makeup of Harold Transome as a Byronic Childe Harold or a Giaour himself, Eliot's treatment of Byron becomes an important element in the novel and necessitates the critical re-reading of his poetry in Eliot's life as a writer and reader.

Clearly, the Byron discussed in Felix Holt is a familiar figure to Mary Ann Evans. In her adolescence, Evans formed close friendships at school with two girls, Martha Jackson and Maria Lewis. Addressing each other as Clematis, Ivy, and Veronica in the fashion of the sentimental “Language of Flowers,” the girls often took, at Evans's suggestion, “assigned subjects for their letters, bones ‘to pick together without contention’” (Haight 25). Usually severely Evangelical and didactic in tone, the letters are an apt illustration of adolescent religious fervor. Written during the “Holy War” period, as Mary Ann Evans defied her father's wishes and refused to attend a church she found theologically moribund, the letters' most significant, and most poignant, resonance is their depiction of a bright young woman living in “a walled-in world” that comes vibrantly alive only through books (Letters 1: 71). Allusions to Carlyle, Byron, and Shakespeare break through the soporific constraints of the “Language of Flowers,” coloring the girls' provincial Evangelical piety with the beginnings of an incisive literary sensibility. Clearly identifying with Byron's roving and Satanic impulses, Mary Ann Evans alludes to him frequently. Like Esther Lyon, she read Byron for pleasure and for affirmation of her own desire to wander, to leave home and its “walled-in” confines and limitations. Her rage often found its voice through the yearning and the anger expressed in Byron's poetry.

Lonely and depressed, in May 1840 George Eliot wrote to her friend Maria Lewis of her dissatisfaction with her “lot” in life:

[To] tell you the truth I begin to feel involuntarily isolated, and without being humble, to have such a consciousness that I am a negation of all that finds love and esteem as makes me anticipate for myself—no matter what; I shall have countless undeserved enemies if my life be prolonged, wherever my lot may be cast, and I need rigid discipline, which I have never yet had. Byron in his Childe Harold (which I have just begun the second time) checks reflections on individual and personal sorrows by reminding himself of the revolutions and woes beneath which the shores of the Mediterranean have groaned. We may with more effectual comparison think of the dangers of the Great Ark of the Church in these latter times of the deluge of sin.

(Letters 1: 51-52)

The remarkable irony here is that Evans, for the moment, finds Byron a source of the “rigid discipline” which she both craves and resists. This letter to Maria Lewis marks the special significance which Byron held for her. Thrown into relief against the background of the letter's pious allusion to the “dangers” now facing the “Great Ark of the Church,” Eliot's allusion to the opening stanza of Childe Harold's fourth canto has the special ring of personal identification. The allusion to Byron, part self-affirmation, part self-derision, reflects not just the tenor of Childe Harold itself, but Evans's attempts to “check” her own desires, which strongly resist containment. If, in the opening of Canto IV, Childe Harold assuages his personal sorrows by comparing them to those of the city of Venice, he also expresses his wanderlust. “I've taught me other tongues—and in strange eyes have made me not a stranger. … I leave behind the inviolate island of the sage and free, and seek me out a home by a remoter sea” (IV: 64-72). Though the young Mary Ann Evans could not yet actually leave England, as had Byron's Harold, clearly she had the desire to escape her “involuntary isolation” and the imprisoning quality of her domestic routine. Seeking escape, Evans found in Byron the ability to brighten “dull life” with “the beings of the mind … essentially immortal” (Childe Harold IV: 37-38).

The allusions to Byron, and particularly to Childe Harold, continue to mark Evans' “flower” correspondence, especially during the crucial period of the “Holy War,” the stand-off between Mary Anne and Issac Evans over church-going. At this time, she inscribed the flyleaf of her copy of Petrarch with four stanzas from Childe Harold's fourth Canto (those referring to Petrarch's tomb). She recorded her reading and re-reading of Byron in her journal and letters. Even more significantly, the Satanic-Byronic attitude is named and assumed in one of her angriest, most personally revealing, and, paradoxically, most “political” letters from this period. The letter clearly reveals that Byron had become an ally in Mary Ann Evans's personal rebellion or private war of independence. Moreover, its political metaphors have direct significance for Esther Lyon's own internal holy war in Felix Holt, which also mixes politics, desire, fathers and daughters, and church-going. Indeed, Evans's letters find politics an apt metaphor for this domestic dispute, just as Felix Holt finds it a metaphor for the disputes within the larger family of humanity. As father and daughter attempt to redraw the boundaries of authority and obedience, the daughter's eloquent arguments are illustrated by images culled not from the language of Victorian family values but from an analogous political issue, Chartism. Evans felt her role as a daughter to be similar to that of an unchartered artisan:

Carlyle says that to the artisans of Glasgow the world is not one of blue skies and a green carpet, but a world of copperas-fumes, low cellars, hard wages, “striking,” and gin; and if the recollection of this picture did not remind me that gratitude should be my reservoir of feeling, that into which all that comes from above or around should be received as a source of fertilization for my soul, I should give a lachrymose parody of the said description and tell you all seriously what I now tell you playfully that mine is too often a world such as Wilkie can so well paint, a walled-in world. … But I must check this Byronic invective. …

(Letters 1: 71)

This strikes the key note of Eliot's identification with Byron. Her enjoyment of him is clear. He is irresistible, read and re-read. But the pleasure is a guilty one. His “invective,” so identifiable with her own rage and her own desire to break free of the rules of her father, must be “checked” and controlled. Like Esther Lyons, she indulges her desire to read, but always with the knowledge that the identification is less a communion with God than with a fallen angel. Reading Byron represents, to Mary Ann Evans, leaving home, a risky endeavor, much dreamed of in her adolescent letters in which she often quotes Byron: “both my heart and my limbs would leap to behold the ‘great and wide sea’ that old Ocean on which man can leave no trace” (qtd. in Letters 1: 101). Leaving “no trace,” leaving identity, girlhood, family, and English society behind, sailing off, like Childe Harold, on the great ocean of independence and self-discovery, is at once terrifying and exhilarating. After the publication of “The True Story of Lady Byron's Life” in August 1869, two years after the writing of Felix Holt, Eliot joined the English readership, scandalized by the revelation of Byron's incest, in a conventional and spasmodic reaction against his poetry. She wrote to her friend Cara Bray,

Byron and his poetry have become more and more repugnant to me of late years (I read a good deal of him a little while ago, in order to form a fresh judgment). As to this story, I cannot help being sorry that it seemed necessary to publish what is only worthy to die and rot. After all Byron remains deeply pitiable, like all of us sinners.

(Letters 5: 54)

It is clear from Eliot's journal that the “fresh judgment” of which she speaks was formed in January 1869, when she recorded reading the first four cantos of Don Juan. But earlier letters reveal a different appreciation of Byron and one which asks to be considered in light of the adolescent Esther Lyon's reading in Felix Holt. Eliot critics may well assume that her mature assessment of Byron is that he was “repugnant,” but it is necessary to examine exactly what fears and concerns went into that judgment. Esther Lyon's furtive, pleasurable reading and ultimate rejection of Byron is not likely to be merely attributable to the development of “good” moral taste. Esther Lyon, like Mary Anne Evans, has a clear but troubled attraction to Byron's sensualism and to his Orientalist fancies, and reexamining Esther's reading and Eliot's re-casting of her political radical in the shape of a Byronic Childe Harold challenges the conservatism of the novel, and leaves us far less certain that Felix Holt is in fact George Eliot. In a novel written by a novelist determined both by temperament and political inclination to show both the overt and covert elements within an organically interwoven community, we cannot assume that the rejection of political radicalism is as clear cut as it once seemed to Eliot scholars. As in Mary Ann Evans's perception of Byron's poetry itself, in her novel the repugnant and the irresistible are often one and the same. As they are aligned, so is the “moral” choice, here embodied by Felix Holt, often easily resistible and as unappealing as the distasteful Casaubon himself in Middlemarch. As in that later novel, it is necessary in Felix Holt to distinguish true morality from ignorant asceticism.

Like Eliot's own reading of Byron, the novel's progress to Esther's ultimate rejection of Byronic ideology is morally and intellectually complicated. Infiltrating the web-like narrative on several different levels and acting as a controversial article of faith, Esther's appreciation for Byron initiates a violent “holy war” of sorts between herself and Felix. In this sense, Byron's Orientalism and his accompanying sensuality inform those two characters' struggle with the experience of sexual desire. Anticipating and literalizing their struggle, the “Giaour,” Harold Transome, serves as a medium through which the pleasures and dangers of desire are acted out. Indeed, the resonances of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and his Oriental Tales help to shape the moral and political universe of Felix Holt.

As in Childe Harold, the setting of the physical, cultural, and moral universe in Felix Holt is a ruin. A metaphor of cultural ruination, Transome Court stands derelict at the novel's opening, ravaged by time. Transome's ancestral home recalls Childe Harold's “good hall” whose “hearth is desolate” and where “wild weeds are gathering on the wall” (I: 130-32). This pervasive sense of ruination extends, in Eliot's novel as in Byron's poem, beyond setting to modern man whose ruin is clearly symbolized in Harold's father, the syphilitic half-witted “old” Mr. Transome, the embittered, wasted Mrs. Transome, and her corrupt lover, Jermyn. Eventually, ruin of a sort will be visited also upon the young Transome heir Harold when he learns of his illegitimacy. But Eliot's allusions to Byron are marked by important deviations from his text. The middle-class novelist introduces a class-consciousness that the aristocratic poet ignores. Here ruination is the pragmatic effect of poverty, class, or race, rather than the result of Romantic ennui. Likewise, Eliot's pilgrim is not endowed with the fine cultural sense of Childe Harold. He does not mourn the loss of classical values represented in Byron's poem by his displeasure in the British alliance with the Ottoman Turks over Greece. Significantly, Harold Transome is one of the “barbarous hands” exploiting Greek culture (I: 953). In Smyrna, then a center of the Ottoman Empire, Transome has bought a captive Greek wife, a slave woman who is the mother of his child Harry.

Clearly, Harold Transome's sojourn in the East and his self-identification as an Oriental is another ripple in Eliot's complex use of the cultural other. Felix Holt seems to voice the very potent cultural forces which insist on the moral corruption of the cultural other. The usually “liberal” Eliot, significantly also now wrestling with her most progressive female narrative, The Spanish Gypsy, in which a European protagonist becomes a gypsy and lives out Maggie Tulliver's fantasy-nightmare desire to escape “civilization,” now looks through the mirror of English culture and affirms stereotypical cultural anxieties. Like her gypsy heroine, Harold Transome exudes an intense eroticism that here proves as unmanageable as it is seductive. As suitor to the Byron-reading Esther Lyon, Harold Transome evokes, as Will Ladislaw will later evoke through both Byron and Shelley, the Satanic Byronic hero as well as Byron's pilgrim Harold. Uniting her own creative vision with this element of allusion, Eliot seems to engage in a moral dialogue with Byron.

Like Childe Harold, Transome is a figure of less than moral properties who, as an illegitimate child, has already “run” through “Sin's long labyrinth” (I: 37). The novel's opening, like Childe Harold, evokes the tradition of the romaunt. Eliot's protagonist has also been “sent upon a mission, the fulfillment of which will prove his courage and other qualities needed for moral survival” (Marshall 36). Eliot's Harold shares with Byron's anti-hero his sense of “a crowded, pressing past—not only the fullness of immediate pleasures but also those dense and obsessive memories which will always haunt such heroes” (Garber 9). The medieval tradition, as it is filtered through Byron's cynicism, fits Harold Transome. He is a strange, alien pilgrim returned to a strange home which is marked with the memory of sexual sin, remorse, and guilt. At Transome Court, first envisioned to the reader as an “enchanted forest in the under world,” the very trees bleed with “human histories” and “unuttered cries” (84). Emissary knight and captain of industry, Harold Transome has one foot in the blood-wet world of Byronic Romanticism and one in Eliot's Victorian world of real socio-political concerns. He is a strange hybrid monster of Gothic Romanticism and Victorian efficiency and energy: “the lizard's egg, that whiterounded passive prettiness, had become a brown, darting, determined lizard” (98). Marking the evolution of literature itself, he is a hero or villain evolved to suit the spirit of his own age, a study in ruthless energy, a dangerous inversion of Childe Harold's Romantic ennui and welschriften. If the East represented spiritual revivification and sensual fascination to Byron and Goethe, it represented another opportunity altogether to the pragmatic nineteenth-century industrialist—the opportunity to make a fortune. This Harold's mission was economic. At the opening of the novel, his moral nature is as bankrupt as his coffers are full.

Indeed, Eliot's Harold may share the experiences of Byron's Childe, but, like Disraeli, whose travels to the East in Byron's footsteps involved more the acquisition of the poet's old servants than his cultural understanding, he shares in the luxury of the East without even the usual Western absorption in its perceived mysticism. For Harold Transome also the East is an “enterprise” (Disraeli, Tancred 439). Much like public perceptions of Childe Harold and the protagonists of Byron's Oriental Tales, Harold Transome's sexuality is marked by his Oriental travels. He poses a political and moral threat to the England to which he returns, and the novel regularly relates politics and morality, beginning with Harold's announcement of himself as a Radical candidate, which strikes his mother “as if her son had said that he had been converted to Mahometanism at Smyrna, and had four wives” (92). Harold signals exactly what Eliot fears in the characters of Fedalma, Caterina Sarti, Maggie Tulliver, or Daniel Deronda—a tainted, dark, almost savage, sexual and political desire, unmitigated and uncontrolled by English perceptions of morality and vocation. Like Victorian Orientalists who translated the Arabian Nights into English, Eliot too is breaking the “Victorian taboo of masking sexuality” but is doing so by speaking only of sexuality “in a removed setting—the East” (Leask 21). Because Transome's empire building involved slave owning and union with the Ottoman empire, he is made an immoral figure with a past and future that is part of the English absorption in an East “ripe for moral and economic appropriation” (Leask 21). Just as Byron casts Giaour and Hassan “in the same mold,” so too Eliot's narrative stance towards Harold reverses (Brantlinger 61).

The fact of Harold's violation of the East is immediately apparent in the presence of his son, Harry. Waiting for Harold's return from Smyrna, his mother is full of anxiety:

[I]f Mrs Transome had expected only her son, she would have trembled less; she expected a little grandson also: and there were reasons why she had not been enraptured when her son had written to her only when he was on the eve of returning that he already had an heir born to him.

(89)

The thinly veiled fact alluded to here will be confirmed by the child Harry's appearance and character and will make another woman “tremble.” The shocked and affronted Esther Lyons learns that “Harry's mother had been a slave—was bought, in fact” (954). Here Eliot suggests that “the Giaour concerned” is not a Romantic figure of “Oriental love,” as Esther knew it “chiefly from Byronic poems,” but an imperialist, even anti-Byronic figure (541). Harry's mother had been Greek. Buying a Greek wife in Smyrna, Harold Transome participates in the modern desecration of Greek civilization which so infuriated Byron. But the image of a captive white Greek woman, made so popular and controversial by Hiram Powers's exhibition of The Greek Slave at the Crystal Palace exhibition in 1851, had even more resonance for the Victorians. Exhibited in America and England, Powers's statue made the image of the Greek slave an icon of the oppressed under tyranny. Her image spoke to feminists, who used slavery as an analogue for sexism, to supporters of Greek independence, to Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, and to feminist poets, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who condemned the statue's passivity in her poem, “Hiram Powers's Greek Slave”). The “subjectivity and intensity” of responses to the statue, however, all share one element (Yellin 110). That is a deep

hatred of the cruel TURK who does thus violate the sacred rights of human nature … our sister with all her affections, aspirations, and high capacities, sold to the bestial TURK, whoever he may be, and he designs to cast her down from her God-given estate, into the dominion of things.

(Frederick Douglass qtd. in Yellin 110)

This is the company Harold Transome keeps in buying a Greek wife. Aligning himself with the “bestial” Turk, he is, of course, more closely associated with a grasping, ugly, dangerously vulgar acquisitiveness and cultural barbarism. But as Powers turns the image of slavery white, so does Eliot reverse the image of the slave-owner, who here is not authentically a Turk, but an Englishman tainted and colored by his associations with the practices of a “bestial” people.

As a Radical candidate, Harold Transome's corrupt history is always with him. He is less Byron's Childe Harold than Disraeli's. The fictional politician returns to Britain just when the historical politician did, returning from Smyrna, where he had enjoyed the same lifestyle as had Harold Transome, learning to

repose on voluptuous ottomans and smoke superb pipes, daily to indulge in the luxuries of a bath which requires half-a-dozen attendants for its perfection; to court the air in a carved caique, by shores which are a perpetual scene, and to find no exertion greater than a canter on a barb. …

(Disraeli, Letters 1: 174)

By creating a similarly luxurious political candidate of equally “voluptuous” morality and strongly imperialist tendencies, Eliot seems to be referring to the problematic morality of Disraeli's imperialist policies. She is indicting, as Byron did, Victorian Englishness itself. Peeling the layers away from the multi-layered character of Harold Transome reveals that his Byronic “Oriental” trappings are mere affection. He is a bastardization of Byron, not the book of poems which Esther is reading against Felix Holt's advice but merely its cover. Here Eliot seems deliberately to be challenging Felix Holt's moral perception of Byron, differentiating between the genuine article and its usurpation.

The threat to Eliot's sense of country posed by this false Childe Harold is clearly present in the new generation of Transomes. With the creation of the heir Harry, Eliot seems again to be stressing the generational contamination of English culture and English family values from within English culture itself. As the Victorian Harold is no improvement on the Romantic, so the Victorian heir is no improvement on the father; he is a further bastardization of the Transome morality. The dangers of the post-1832, post-reform political world are embodied in him. Darkly “savage,” gibbering his own incomprehensible polyglot language, the baby Harry literally consumes and is consumed by the forces which created him. He first appears as “a black-maned little boy” who is driving old, feeble-minded Mr. Transome as if his grandfather were a horse and himself the master (177). The “little savage,” whose speech is “a broken lisping polyglot of hazardous interpretation,” cannot understand his grandmother's warning that he let her dog “alone—he'll bite” if Harry pulls his tail (178). But the advice is misconstrued. Harry is like an animal himself, unable to control his appetite or understand the difference between people and animals. In front of the comically aristocratic Sir Maximus and Lady De Barry, who have come to learn of his father's candidacy, Harry bites his grandmother. They immediately conclude that the savage boy with the “great black eyes … doesn't look like a lady's child” (177-79). “After living in the East so long he may have become the sort of people one would not care to be intimate with” (179). Later, the child Harry, still unable to understand English, names his grandmother “Bite” (492). As the plot of Felix Holt thickens with the mixed blood of racial and class difference, it clearly expresses an almost over-determined anxiety over the “dilution” of blood and fusion of races.

Characteristic of Eliot's fiction, Harry's name for his grandmother suggests that it remains unclear who has bitten whom. The child Harry has, in a sense, been bitten or marked by his grandmother. It is to her, in the scheme of Victorian racial and classist stereotypes, that he owes his father's immoral influence. If he is not “a lady's child,” his father is not a gentleman's child. Jermyn possesses, like his son and grandson, “latent savageness” (115). Once unleashed amidst the aristocracy, and chartered with political power, those elements have teeth. Baby Harry is then a metaphor for his father's “low” heritage and political radicalism. The visiting Sir Maximus and Lady De Barry never get to the question of “Harold's politics” and rush away only to have their suspicions confirmed. Harold “has become a regular beast among those Mahometans—he's got neither religion nor morals left. He can't know anything about English politics” (182). The savage Oriental, a very “licentious man” (182), is both personally and politically suspect.

De Barry's condemnation is ironic. While the English aristocrats perceive Harold as an Oriental usurper, Eliot's narrator critically identifies his character with English imperialism and an empty, economic Orientalism. Not truly of the East in the sense that Fedalma or Daniel Deronda will be, not truly different in the sense that Will Ladislaw, Dorothea Brooke, or Maggie Tulliver are, Harold Transome is a purely English entity. His illegitimate, biting child, confused in the very direction of his attack, represents the illegitimacy of his Oriental trappings.

Though Eliot condemns Harold Transome's imperialist exploits, his exotic sexuality still clings to him like the scent of “atta of roses” (601). Esther's “Giaour” becomes the object of her desire; her reading of Byron, which sensitizes her to the “Oriental love” she thinks Transome represents, becomes the stuff of her resistance to the ascetic, pleasure-denying Felix Holt (541). Indeed, the English lovers' stand-off over Esther's reading of Byron is explosive and violent. So intense is Holt's reaction to the poet that, ironically, this pacifist “should like to come and scold [Esther] every day, and make her cry and cut her fine hair off” (154). Willing to “live on raw turnips to subdue [his] flesh” (150, 156), Felix perceives Esther and her Byron as a sensual, luxurious trap meant to keep him from his “fine” political “purpose” (156). Quite literally, he hates her:

I could grind my teeth at such self-satisfied minxes, who think they can tell everybody what is the correct thing, and the utmost stretch of their ideas will not place them on a level with the intelligent fleas. I should like to see if she could be made ashamed of herself.

(156)

Felix's sadistic desires to punish, scold, and injure Esther are returned, like Dorothea's to Casaubon's or Romola's to Savonorola's, with something approaching love. Though she thinks “she could never love any one who was so much of a pedagogue and a master,” she also experiences “a strange contradiction of impulses”; sexual desire and sexual repugnance are clearly at issue in the flare-up over Byron (213).

For Felix Holt and Esther Lyon, the exiled Byron becomes an emblem of the sexuality which Esther must conceal or distance herself from as a lady and which Felix Holt labels debauchery and a distraction from his “fine purpose” (156). Discovering Esther's reading, Felix discovers her sexuality, and in the act of that discovery, Esther notes Felix's virility, his “massive” build and his “large clear gray eyes and full lips” (150). Discovering Byron in Esther's work basket takes on the quality of violent sexual exposure when the large, rough Felix accidentally knocks over the basket, revealing her reading and her private thoughts:

down went the blue-frilled work-basket, flying open, and dispersing on the floor reels, thimble, muslin work, a small sealed bottle of atta of rose, and something heavier than these—a duodecimo volume which fell close to him. … “Byron's Poems!” he said, in a tone of disgust, while Esther was recovering all the other articles. “‘The Dream’—he'd better have been asleep and snoring. What! do you stuff your memory with Byron, Miss Lyon?”

(150)

The basket, dressed in blue like Esther herself, goes down and spills its “small, sealed” feminine secrets, the “heavier” of which is the hidden volume. Blundering and invasive, disapproving and pedagogic, Felix now acts the role of moral arbiter. As his voice has been assumed to be Eliot's own, traditional readings find this “first determining confrontation” with Felix central to the novel. “The theme of Esther's ‘dreaming’ consciousness, stuffed as it is with illusion, and her progressive awakening, is central to Felix Holt” (editor's note, Eliot, Felix 655 n11). Esther's “illusions,” symbolized by her admiration for “The Dream,” impede her moral progress. This reading is underscored by strict interpretations of George Eliot's aestheticism. How could the admirer of the Dutch realists also admire the literary tinsel of Byron's poetry? But such wholesale generic distinctions break down in the face of the novel's complexity. The rejection of Byron, consistently placed in aesthetic terms, is less a question of ways of writing than of ways of experiencing desire. Better to examine what so repulses in “The Dream” and exactly what Felix Holt would like to see left “asleep” (150).

In “The Dream,” Esther is reading the narrative of what is later to “disgust” Mary Anne Evans, the story of a forbidden, perhaps incestuous love. Already repulsed by the sexual nature of the poem, Felix Holt is reacting not just to Esther's penchant for what he thinks is inferior poetry but to sex. Aggressively asexual, he cannot bear the poetry of seduction. Byron is an especially acute representation here because his poetry so often explores the male self under siege from predatory women. Ironically, Byron's male heroes express “what it might be like to be a heroine, compelled to negotiate and often to feign compliance in a world made by and for those who hold power” (Franklin 72). This type of threat is clear in “The Dream” in which the young male narrator is in love with a compelling woman who seduces him and then leaves him grieving and in “misery” (l.208). Felix's crude protests against women reflect the promise of Byron's “Dream” in which exactly what Felix fears from women happens to the protagonist:

He had no breath, no being, but in hers:
She was his voice; he did not speak to her,
But trembled on her words: she was his sight,
For his eye follow'd hers, and saw with hers,
Which coloured all his objects:—he had ceased
To live within himself: she was his life,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
Which terminated all.

(“The Dream” 51-57)

When Esther's frilled work basket falls down and her private desires are made public, it is, for Felix, as if Pandora's box has been opened. That opening strikes a deep-seated fear that Esther's femininity is dangerously encompassing, capable of sapping the powerful man's strength, canceling his intellectual power. Like the lover in Byron's poem, the “clear, gray eyes” will have no sight, “the full lips” no voice, and the massive body no life “within himself.” His fear speaks in his misogyny: “Women,” he tells Esther, are “a curse; all life is stunted to suit their littleness. That's why I'll never love, if I can help it; and if I love, I'll bear it, and never marry” (212). Felix is afraid that his mouth will become “stuffed” with love and that his political voice will be stopped.

That Felix will eventually accept Esther as his wife and that Esther will reject her Byron and pseudo-Byronic Oriental lover suggests that the novel is less interested in Esther's “moral” progress than in focusing on an explosive, nearly violent sexual negotiation which is mediated through Byron's poetry and through the Byronic resonances in Eliot's Harold Transome. After Felix Holt makes his feelings about women known, Esther trembles and actually “pinch[es] her own hand to overcome her tremor” in a “desperate effort” not to reveal the emotional wound inflicted by his words (212). At this moment, when physical self-punishment seeks to squelch sexual interest or desire, the novel's paramount concern with the denial of sexual pleasure rather than with “moral progress” and aesthetics becomes clear. Indeed, those elements are integrated here. It is no wonder that the text must bring a Byronic other to life, calling upon an outsider, Harold Transome, to mediate desire between Esther and Felix. In their moral standoff, similar to that between Maggie Tulliver and Stephen Guest, Esther and Felix are in an anti-progressive, static position. If anyone is to move toward marriage rather than death, “moral progress” of the type which motivates Maggie Tulliver or the young Dorothea Brooke must be replaced with the ability to experience and act upon sexual desire. That act cannot be accomplished without negotiating the almost gothic, transforming threat to selfhood and reason represented by Byron's contemptible “Dream.” Indeed, Felix Holt himself must own the desire voiced in Byron's poem, ceasing to live only “within himself” if he is to live with a woman. Felix Holt must step into Byron's dream and into the underworld of desire which it represents.

III.

Indeed, from the opening of Felix Holt, we are asked to value dreams. In the concluding paragraph of her preface to the novel, Eliot makes an analogy between Transome Court and

a dolorous enchanted forest in the under world. The thornbushes there, and the thick-barked stems, have human histories hidden in them; the power of unuttered cries dwells in the passionless-seeming branches, and the red warm blood is darkly feeding the quivering nerves of a sleepless memory that watches through all dreams. These things are a parable.

(84)

The prince of this “enchanted forest in the underworld” is the dark pilgrim, Harold Transome. He is the “someone expected” from the East at the novel's opening (85). The illegitimate child of the aristocratic Mrs. Transome and her bourgeois solicitor, Transome carries within his body a mixture of blood that “darkly feeds” his mother's omnipresent memory of her adultery with a member of the bourgeoisie. The violation of that taboo, strong enough to be termed miscegenation, is reinforced by Eliot's constant references to Jermyn's brownness. Jermyn may as well, like Maggie Tulliver or Daniel Deronda, be a gypsy, a mulatto, a Moor, or a Jew. Ambition and sexual desire darken him. His is an unchecked immorality that guilt and asceticism will never wash white. Harold Transome, his son, also literally marked by the “black seal,” his father's darkness of skin, low birth, and immoral behavior, has naturally gravitated to a very English type of debauchery in the Orient (583). In Smyrna, he becomes a merchant king much as little Maggie envisions herself as a gypsy queen. He returns a captain of industry, literally “plump” with Turkish money, rose satin cushions, and baby Harry.

Indeed, as an Oriental British imperialist and a political radical, a member of the bourgeoisie and the landed gentry, Harold Transome is an ingenious fashioning of what much of Victorian England feared and desired in 1832 and in 1867. Created in 1866, when the country was focused on the Reform Bill of 1867, Transome's alliance with the East, and particularly with Turkey, resonates with the idea of political despotism. Harold's Turkish fortune has important ramifications for the novel's feminism and its reform politics. In fact, in the early nineteenth century, in part due to Byron's poetry, which detailed the treatment of women and the underclass in Eastern cultures, “Turkey was a byword for tyranny,” particularly “in Whiggish political jargon” (Franklin 34). Byron's speech in the House of Lords on the 27th of February, 1812, was in keeping with earlier tendencies to align western political conservatism or Toryism with Turkish “despotism.” Comparing “barbaric” abuses in Turkey to the treatment of his own working countrymen, Byron said: “I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country” (Selected 111).

In addition to criticizing the treatment of the male underclass in Turkey, Byron's Oriental tales often focused on Turkish sexual politics, the tyranny special to the Turkish harem. Like the American sculptor Hiram Powers later in the century, Byron used the image of the Greek slave woman to dramatize the crisis of slavery, the usurpation of the classical ideals of democracy, and the universal sexual exploitation of women. Using the image of “barbaric” imperialist Turks to critique their own politics, Byron and George Eliot follow a western tradition established in the eighteenth century. Mary Wollstonecraft and Montesquieu both found the sexual politics of the harem an appropriate analogy for their own political discontents. In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft used the harem as a “constant referent” (Franklin 34). Earlier, Montesquieu's Persian Letters were a “sustained and profound meditation on the interrelationships of familial and political life” (Shanley and Stillman 66). There, he “ironically parallels control of the seraglio with strategies of monarchical tyranny—comparing France with Turkey” (35). Montesquieu's protagonist, Usbek, is a sultan visiting the West and corresponding all the while with his wife and eunuchs in the harem. In Montesquieu's treatment, “oriental love” becomes a metaphor for despotism and sexual tyranny.

Under Usbek's rhetoric of love lies an absolutism based on mutual fear: he is both husband and prince; the eunuchs are both harem guards and political ministers. The denouement is shocking: his favourite wife writes defiantly that she has taken poison, her lover having been executed, and that she dies proclaiming her joy at release through death from Usbek's tyranny.

(Franklin 35)

Franklin suggests that Byron begins his Oriental tales at this point in the Western tradition of the representation of the Eastern harem, with the death or mistreatment of a heroine at the hands of a Hassan. George Eliot is indeed concerned with the same Oriental narrative pattern through the triad of her heroines, the vulnerable Esther Lyon, the adulterous Mrs. Transome, and the half-exotic, half-familiar Harold Transome.

The resonances of Montesquieu's, Byron's, and Wollstonecraft's mythologizing of the East are clear in Felix Holt. However, Eliot's particular recasting of Byron's Giaour allows her to critique both domestic and sexual politics in an innovative way. In Byron's poem, or in any of his eastern tales, the western expatriate Giaour is in sympathy with the adulterous slave girl, not the Hassan, her Eastern captor. The Giaour is a tragic hero, a thwarted rescuer. This order is obscured in Felix Holt in which Harold Transome, “the Giaour concerned,” is a slave-owner himself. Here Eliot appears to be criticizing her own society as much as that of the “barbaric Turks.” In his Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said argues that the nineteenth-century Western writer sees his or her own world vision as defined by “positive ideas of home” and nation (81). That vision necessarily validates the western world and devalues other worlds. The vision of empire in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, for instance, does not “inhibit or give resistance to horrendously unattractive imperialist practices” (81). However, in Felix Holt, empire works both ways. The “barbaric” Turks are in league with the equally barbaric English. Moreover, Eliot's narrative is further complicated by the issue of gender and sexual politics. For George Eliot is an outsider to an extent that Austen never was. Maggie Tulliver, for example, would not head out for the gypsy's camp had she a “positive idea of home”; traditional Christian values become the Inquisition which the gypsy Fedalma flees in The Spanish Gypsy; Dorothea leaves Middlemarch with the object of her desire; and Daniel Deronda departs from the philistinism of England “to the East” at the end of Eliot's last novel. In Eliot's novels, it is often the familiar, white face that is barbaric, the “cruel Turk”; the dark face looks as if it could be mother to Maggie Tulliver. Perfectly fulfilling the definitions of tyrant and barbarian, the slave-owning Harold signals his corruption of classical political values and the corruption of the British imperialist.

Moreover, placed so explicitly within the context of reform, the dark threat of Harold Transome and Matthew Jermyn represents Eliot's anxieties about the reinvention of English society itself. Transome, a study in paradoxes, represents political ambition and sexual desire; his alter ego, Felix Holt, attempts to control, forcefully, those desires. The ultra-white, ultra-Anglo, remarkably politically passive and misogynist radical Felix Holt is as much the bogeyman of English culture here as is Harold Transome. Indeed, Esther's choice between the two reflects less the “positive ideas” of home and more Eliot's attempt to contain the threatening energy of reform.

A “white” dove, fettered to the nineteenth-century female narrative, Esther knows that “[a]fter all, she [is] a woman, and [can]not make her own lot” (524-25). That, she acknowledges, “is made for her by the love she accepts” (525). The practical problem of Esther's future clearly informs her decision to marry either hero. Esther first describes her predicament to Felix, then remembers it when she thinks of marrying Harold. Contrasting the anti-sensual Felix Holt with the luxurious Harold Transome, Eliot resists romanticizing Esther's difficult “final choice”; “[o]n each side there was renunciation” (590). Like the dark Maggie's death embrace of the blue-eyed Tom Tulliver, Esther chooses in Felix a disapproving, stern pedagogue and a nearly chaste brotherly love rather than Harold Transome's “passion” (590). That elusive element remains a danger to Esther Lyon, threatening the “supreme,” “sublime” love that the didactic moral figure Felix Holt represents (591). To conquer passion, Esther must thwart her own “will” or desire (591). The higher moral love

is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness. It is not true that love makes all things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.

(591)

“What is difficult,” in the moral universe of George Eliot, is all too often what is chaste. Conquering desire rather than indulging it is the force that creates society in the image of heaven. Hence “the presence and the love of Felix Holt” make the “vulgarity” and “privation” of their married life “as if it were heaven” (591).

In contrast to that heaven is the “Utopia” of Transome Court, which is consistently described as an Eastern harem. Kept at the manor, Mrs. Transome ruminates about her secret adultery and her suicidal despair over its revelation, recalling, the adulterous wives of Montesquieu and Byron's Eastern poems. Harold constructs “pleasure grounds” on the eastern side of the manor to amuse his mother and early on tells her that she's had to do far too much in managing the household and worrying “about things that don't properly belong to a woman—… We'll set all that right. You shall have nothing to do now but to be grandmamma on satin cushions” (95). This entrapment in static luxury becomes explicitly named later as part and parcel of the “Oriental love” which tempts Esther Lyon.

This representation of the harem and of “Oriental love” is indebted to those of Byron, Montesquieu, and, especially, Mary Wollstonecraft, which associate the harem with both sexual pleasure and female enslavement. Like opium, the harem entices through its sheer immersion in sensibility. In Enlightenment or Rousseauian political philosophy of exactly the type which Felix Holt espouses, abandoning the self to sensibility promises the death of reason. Like Wollstonecraft's polemic, Eliot's novel uses the harem, a metaphor for the experience of female desire itself, to link “woman's pleasure” to her “dependent and deferential status” (Kaplan 32). The frivolous, Byron-reading Esther is already, as Felix Holt has noted, an anti-model of Wollstonecraftian feminism, having begun “an early and corrupt initiation in the sensual” (Kaplan 35). The misogynist Felix's asceticism warns that desire itself is counter-revolutionary.

The heroine in Felix Holt is then faced with a difficult choice, and Eliot accents the difficulty by lingering extensively over the pleasures of the enclosed harem that is Transome Court. She emphasizes its luxuries and its “small dignities” along with its vaguely “repugnant” air of moral laxity (547). It is described as Esther's “Utopia,” and the longer she stays there as its possible mistress, the more she comes under its influence. Indeed, her visit becomes a metaphor for her capacity to experience pleasure. Quite unlike Maggie Tulliver or Dorothea Brooke, Esther Lyon feels “an exquisite kind of shame” at knowing that she is interested in two men at once (522). She is “susceptible” to her own desires (522).

It comes in so many forms in this life of ours—the knowledge that there is something sweetest and noblest of which we despair, and the sense of something present that solicits us with an immediate and easy indulgence. And there is a pernicious falsity in the pretence that a woman's love lies above the range of such temptations. … Esther began to think that her lot was being made for her by the love that was surrounding her with the influence of a garden on a summer morning.

(523-25)

In the luxury of the manor, Esther is not above temptation. Eliot decries the Victorian belief that women are not tempted because “woman's love” lies above the erotic by referring back to the radical political theorists of the novel's pre-Victorian setting. Indeed, perhaps as much in Mary Wollstonecraft's anti-sensual Vindication as in Eastern sexual mythology, it is just that near phobia of female sensuality which necessitates their enclosure in the harem. Esther responds to Harold's “gradual wooing” and finds him “alluring” in a way which Felix Holt is not (524).

Like Wollstonecraft, Eliot had great difficulty voicing female desire in the face of its role as an anti-rational, disruptive force. The need for the containment of that force causes the pleasures of the harem to be quickly displaced by the image of enslavement. During a crucial discussion, Harold draws Esther “down the eastern steps into the pleasure-ground” of Transome Court. His maneuverings reflect his own move from West to East and his troubling identification as both Hassan and Giaour, sultan and rescuer. Indeed, Esther has difficulty placing him in any “genre” (540). He is not “a tragic hero,” “not a romantic figure,” not “languishing enough,” “not in danger of committing suicide” (540). Instead, Esther says, he is simply a widower. As his Byronic literary veils fall away and the talk becomes serious, Esther literally trembles. At the mention of his marital status, Harold says that his first wife never held the place Esther might. She asks, “How so?”

“Harry's mother had been a slave—was bought, in fact.”

It was impossible for Harold to preconceive the effect this had on Esther. … Hitherto Esther's acquaintance with Oriental love was derived chiefly from Byronic poems, and this had not sufficed to adjust her mind to a new story, where the Giaour concerned was giving her his arm. She was unable to speak.

(541)

Eliot's heroine enacts Wollstonecraft's comparisons of English women to harem slaves as Esther makes the connection between herself and Harold's first wife, between his love and “degradation.” The threat to Esther posed by Harold's sexual attention becomes immediately apparent. Like many of the other scenes of “love-talk” between Harold and Esther, this one too is immediately preceded by a vision of little Harry's undisciplined play. “Like a barbaric prince,” himself, Harry treats others as if they were animals, biting, hitting, and turning family hierarchy upside down in a chaotic swirl (526). Looking at Harry, who bears the mark of the harem and, paradoxically, that of the empire, it is “inevitable” that she should think of his mother (540). It is also inevitable that the child Harry should represent all the forces of untrammeled sensibility, the death of reason and the degradation of culture in his own genesis. It is a testament to Eliot's struggle to represent female desire that the sight of this child does not result in Esther rejecting Harold Transome. And indeed, true to their literary discussion, the licentious Transome evolves into something far less than a villain. Sensitive to the delicacy of his position as suitor to the newly endowed Esther, he asks for her sympathy: “I am necessarily in a painful position for a man who has any feeling” (541). “At last Harold had stirred the right fibre” (541). “Feeling” is, as in Wollstonecraft's doctrine, strongly tied to dependency and passivity. The more emotionally solicitous and beseeching Harold becomes toward Esther, the “more passive” she becomes “to his attentions” (547). “A compromise with things repugnant to the moral taste” seems possible, even likely (547). Finally, Esther does not voice her rejection of Harold; he rejects her, out of honor, when he learns of his low birth. And indeed, in accepting a legacy from Transome, Esther, though she marries Felix Holt, participates in those “things repugnant” which his Turkish fortune can buy. Her refusal to be the object of her Giaour's campaign is less clearly motivated than the novel's simply crafted ending, the marriage of Esther and Felix.

That marriage is marked, finally, more by renunciation than by any embrace of the passion which distances Esther from Transome. It is complicated by the fact that Harold Transome himself has made moral progress. Facing “the most serious moment” in his life—the failure of his political campaign, the possible failure of his personal attempt to win Esther, and the acknowledgment of his illegitimacy—Transome rises to the occasion. “For the first time the iron had entered into his soul, and he felt the hard pressure of our common lot, the yoke of that mighty resistless destiny laid upon us by the acts of other men as well as our own” (587). Transome has, moreover, “acted so that he could defy any one to say he was not a gentleman” (590). His passion and tenderness are real; in recognizing their authenticity, Esther rejects him. “Harold Transome's love, no longer a hovering fancy with which she played, but become a serious fact, seemed to threaten her with a stifling oppression” (592). Indeed, despite Harold's reformation, marriage to him continues to fall into the harem paradigm. It is “silken bondage,” “a fall and a degradation,” “to be languid among all appliances for pleasure” (592). Consequently, Esther tells him that she loves Felix, and that she “resigned all claim to the Transome estates. She wished to go back to her father” (599). Esther, like Maggie Tulliver, curtails her own ability to experience pleasure or freedom with an exotic outsider. Rejecting her Giaour, embracing the very English Felix Holt, she also marries his values and those of her ascetic preacher-father's. When, “not reading, but stitching,” she meets Felix again, she tells him that she is there now ready to marry him and “needing to be scolded” (600). “Have you considered well what it would be?—that it will be a very bare and simple life?” he asks. “Yes,” she replies, “without atta of roses,” and without the sensibility which distinguishes her attraction to Harold Transome (601).

Like other Victorian writers, Eliot wrote most readily of desire when she dramatized it as the property of other cultures, other classes, or other races. But, unlike Dickens, Thackeray, or the Brontës, Eliot's “long and assured development” of an interest in foreignness results less in sheer stereotyping than in an expression of her fascination in the other (Hardy 9). That fascination, to continue in The Spanish Gypsy, Daniel Deronda, and Middlemarch, makes a remarkable representation of relations between the English and others. For Harold Transome, the “Oriental,” is a kind of fake, an English creation, a strange Giaour wrought by inverting the Byronic model and the Victorian imperialist plot. At once a Byronic sensualist and an anti-Byronic Ottoman or Hassan, Transome washes otherness over with Englishness until he is over-determined as a character. Representing the “sultanic habits” of the East, he nonetheless remains a criticism of British imperialism. A strange melange of the East and West, he ultimately represents the desire which Eliot struggles to contain and control in her “English story” (Haight 381).

Indeed, Esther's choice of Felix Holt over Harold Transome only partially restores the novel's own ideals regarding moral compromise as it only partially restores the Victorian novel's generic conventions regarding race and class. Certainly, Esther's legacy and Felix's release from prison through Transome's intervention has over the years left Eliot's readers dissatisfied. The novel's moral high road itself is obscured, as is identity itself. Esther finally settles down with Felix to produce, it seems, nothing. “There is a young Felix,” who comes of their marriage, and “who has a great deal more science than his father, but not much more money” (606). North Loamshire “does not yet return a radical candidate,” and, to thwart that possibility further, Eliot will not reveal where Felix Holt and Esther live: “As to the town in which Felix Holt now resides, I will keep that a secret, less he should be troubled by any visitor having the insufferable motive of curiosity” (606).

Bent on protecting Felix Holt and, perhaps, her novel, from those who would ask too many questions about the hero's political or domestic future, Eliot's narrator reveals the pressures by which the novel itself is molded. Even the economics of the novel's end are strangely static, as if Esther's stipend, a cut of the huge fortune Harold made in Smyrna, will never multiply and increase, as if Felix Holt's son will not earn an income proportionate to his acquisition of “more science.” The stifling of increase and political change, which marks the end of Felix Holt—so inconsistent with the social realities of a novel in which we feel from its inception the steam of the Victorian locomotive veritably at our backs—is even more effectively consistent with its attempt to contain, keep secret, and control both political and sexual desire. A view of both Englishness and otherness, Felix Holt leaves the Oriental other, Harold Transome, an outcast at the novel's end, wishing he'd “never come back to this pale English sunshine” (582). The strangely foreign Englishman foreshadows the arrival in Eliot's canon of another outcast of mixed heritage, Will Ladislaw. His presence in Middlemarch, to be written after she had completed her portrait of Fedalma in The Spanish Gypsy, continues Eliot's dialogue between otherness and political and sexual desire. The marriage of Will Ladislaw and Dorothea Brooke as the consummate accomplishment of Middlemarch will release what is still so carefully and problematically contained in Felix Holt, The Radical.

Notes

1. In this article I use the terms, “race,” “blood,” “other,” “exotic,” and “Oriental” with the knowledge that these terms are actually tropes, constructs of a dominant culture, here the culture of Victorian England. In using this language, I wish to evoke, not share, the sense of distance and strangeness with which Eliot, Byron, and other Victorians viewed non-English peoples. I do not, as Gates urged in 1985, demarcate my awareness of the culturally-constructed aspects of these terms with the use of quotation marks. I assume that, since the publication of Gates's landmark work on the subject, “Race,” Writing, and Difference, and of Said's Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, I am addressing a community that is also aware of the socially, culturally, and historically constructed aspects of race, blood, otherness, exoticism, and Orientalism.

2. See Bodenheimer, Gallagher, and Graver for studies of her alliance of domestic and reform politics.

3. Ascetic, pedagogic, and severe, the morals of Felix Holt himself have in the past been perceived as those of Eliot. This is particularly crucial in the novel's play on a key article of moral faith, the reading of Byron. Recently readers of Eliot have begun to argue that the narrative voice does not necessarily “identify with [Felix Holt]” (Sheets 157). As Sheets suggests, Eliot's identification with her protagonist ought not to be such a given. Eliot's “radical” is, after all, boorish, pedantic, and rigid. His naive, homespun speeches and gestures take place in a novel where “honest, direct discourse seems to have no place” and where “words themselves have become difficult to decipher” (146-47). Ultimately, Felix is unable to master language, to “recover” it for his own and his party's uses.

4. Beginning Middlemarch, Eliot quoted from Childe Harold to describe her meandering approach, like the “lazy Scheldt … [rather than] the arrowy Rhone,” to the new project (Letters 5: 16).

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