[In the following essay, Lesjak discusses Eliot's representation of the working class, which she removes from the productive sphere and situates within the domestic sphere in order to minimize class conflicts and disparities in income.]

The industrial novel occupies a unique place in the context of debates about realism. As Erich Auerbach suggests, the subject matter of the realist novel—the masses or “the common people”—comes into being as a serious subject for literature as part of realism's inexorable logic:

Realism had to embrace the whole reality of contemporary civilization, in which to be sure the bourgeoisie played a dominant role, but in which the masses were beginning to press threateningly ahead as they became ever more conscious of their own function and power. The common people in all its ramifications had to be taken into the subject matter of serious realism.

(497)

Within realism's impulse or dynamic toward the representation of the masses lies the search for the ever more novel or strange, the desire for the discovery of new aesthetic material with which to work. Citing the Goncourts as exemplary of this driven fascination with the common people, Auerbach quotes Edmond de Goncourt himself, who articulates this appeal in terms that strongly echo those of the imperial or colonizing impulse, seeking adventure in foreign places: “the people, the mob, if you will, has for me the attraction of unknown and undiscovered populations, something of the exoticism which travelers go to seek” (498).

For our purposes here what is important are the textual and aesthetic determinants of such an attitude. Auerbach argues that this attitude necessarily excludes from its representation “everything functionally essential, the people's work, its position within modern society, the political, social, and moral ferments which are alive in it and which point to the future” (498, emphasis added). Given this, one may well ask, what then can or does the so-called industrial novel do? If, indeed, the impetus motivating its representational concerns functionally precludes the representation of its supposed subject matter—the working people and their work—what does the industrial novel in fact represent?

Raymond Williams, in his ground-breaking work Culture and Society, reads the industrial novel as a genre defined by its conflicting concerns (99-119). On the one hand, these novels embody a critical response to industrialism, with, in some cases, genuine sympathy for the plight of the working class. On the other hand, in the face of the actual conditions of the working class, they back down from any serious involvement out of fear, opting instead for a backdoor exit of sorts involving either the death or the emigration—to a new world, often the New World—of their politically engaged and potentially militant protagonists. Williams identifies this ultimate withdrawal, fueled as it is initially out of sympathy, as the determining “structure of feeling” of the industrial novel.

This conflict between concern on the one hand and fear on the other not only determines the internal structure of these novels, but constitutes as well their failure realistically to represent the social conditions of their time. The fear of violence, according to Williams, distorts even the best of intentions: Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, which comes closest for Williams to identifying imaginatively with and hence representing the “lived experience” of the working class, is finally unable to sustain its sympathy for that experience once the threat of violence arises and with it, the potential for that violence to be organized through collective solidarity and struggle. This inability is marked in Gaskell's text by the recourse to conventional sentimental fiction, as the novel's center moves from John Barton and his participation in the workers' union to the love trials of Mary Barton and her journey to exonerate her lover, falsely accused of murder. In other cases, such as that of Dickens's Hard Times, withdrawal takes the form of confused passivity amidst the tangle of complex social forces: Blackpool's “Aw a muddle!” becomes synonymous with Dickens's treatment of the working class in general; a typically adolescent posture in its claim to have “seen through” society while simultaneously rejecting any real engagement in that society, Dickens's work thus figures for Williams more as a symptom than an assessment, realistic or otherwise, of the very confusions of industrial society that it purports to represent. Whatever the actual specifics of each individual novel's resolution—be it that of Alton Locke, North and South, or Felix Holt—the strategy, one of containment, remains essentially the same.¹ Moreover, as Williams notes in conclusion, it is a strategy or structure of feeling whose provenance is by no means limited to the nineteenth century, but whose legacy remains with us today.

While Williams's argument has great explanatory power, most notably in its identification of the structure motivating the oft-noted murky politics of these novels, Williams's own interpretive politics themselves bear further investigation. In the midst of his critique of Mary Barton we find Williams bemoaning what he sees as Gaskell's shift towards sentimental fiction as a fall of sorts: “[Mary's] indecision between Jem Wilson and ‘her gay lover, Harry Carson’; her agony in Wilson's trial; her pursuit and last-minute rescue of the vital witness; the realization of her love for Wilson: all this, the familiar and orthodox plot of the Victorian novel of sentiment, but of little lasting interest” (101). Implicit in this diagnosis is a strict delineation of “industrial” novels as separate from and superior to (if done authentically) merely sentimental fiction which for Williams can be of “little lasting interest.” Such a view is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Williams's model has served as an exemplar for subsequent interpretations of the industrial novel. Hence, once categorized as “industrial,” a novel is subject to interpretation based on its politics, politics here meaning that which deals with broad social issues properly circumscribed in the public sphere. Within such a framework, a novel such as Mary Barton (or Felix Holt, Sybil, and so on) is either judged a good book by critics sympathetic to its liberal or humanitarian politics or a bad book by those who condemn this self-same liberalism. In either case, the so-called industrial novel is relegated to the “political” camp of literature in contrast to the homier domain of “domestic” or sentimental fiction. And should a novel stray out of the factory and into the home, within a Marxist framework it spells political doom.

All this is not to say that we should relish the sentimental strains of Mary Barton or any other industrial novel. Instead, it is to point out the particular representational quandary in which many critics, following the lead of Williams, have placed the industrial novel. On the one hand, these novels cannot be “great” literature if and when they stray from their mission of authenticity, which, needless to say, they always do. And, when they do stray into the realm of properly domestic fiction, they certainly cannot be considered great because sentimental fiction (obviously?) is of no “lasting interest.” On the face of it, such a division falsely implies that domestic fiction deals exclusively with the domestic sphere whereas industrial fiction has as its singular domain the public sphere.²

In addition to this sort of exclusion of the domestic from the public sphere, there is another exclusion which operates with a certain specificity to the industrial novel, given its project, broadly defined, of representing industrialization and its social effects. This exclusion is one in which the notion of “culture” (here inclusive of more than simply literary culture) is used as an ideological weapon to exclude the realm of production from the bourgeois public sphere.³ That is, culture becomes part of the bourgeois public sphere's arsenal of exclusions and disavowals; through the ideology of culture, the producers of England's wealth are barred from participation and inclusion in the public sphere because they are deemed deficient in cultural capital. Culture becomes a litmus test for workers being admitted into the public sphere. Thus, the same notion of Arnoldian culture which has worked to situate the industrial novel outside of the literary canon, also serves to exclude the sphere of production from the public sphere—both in the industrial novel and in Victorian society itself.⁴

Paradoxically, while Williams's body of work emphasizes the need to theorize culture not, as Arnold does, as something discrete and autonomous but rather as integral to all social practices, for the most part he leaves out the cultural formation of imperialism and its determining effects upon England and English culture. As I will argue, however, the crisis of industrialism, the industrial novel's raison d'être, and its connected attempt to understand the newly-emerging experience and processes of modernity, cannot be understood outside the context of English nationalism and Empire. It is here that the exoticism of the Goncourts is more generally applicable. If we read the industrial novel as a narrative of “internal” travel, with its respective authors operating as adventure-seeking travelers of sorts, the masses, through metaphoric displacement, are situated much like the exotic, colonial Other, but with the added thrust that their threat to England is if anything greater than that of the colonial, existing as it does within the internal, domestic boundaries of England.⁵ Faced with the cultural anxiety wrought by the possibility of internal disruption and division, the industrial novel emplots a paradigmatic structure wherein the attempt to represent the fearfully internal Other—the working class—necessitates its eventual absorption into a new community, one whose membership admits an identification beyond that of class interest, in place of class distinctions; that is, the unifying ideology of the national body. The cementing of this national ideology is predicated on the erasure of class and gender inequalities. Or, as Benedict Anderson has formulated it, “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in the imagined community of ‘nation,’ the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (7, emphasis added).

In the following reading of George Eliot's Felix Holt, I will argue that this process occurs through a series of displacements involving ever-wider spheres: from production to the domestic sphere of consumption, from the domestic sphere to the national sphere, and finally from the national to the imperial sphere, with each move entailing a symbolic resolution of conflict.⁶ A central precondition for this symbolic resolution of conflict is the exclusion of work and working-class struggle from representation; an exclusion prompted, on the one hand, by the very real demands being made by the English working class for political representation and, on the other hand, naturalized almost seamlessly by a politics of culture which shifts the terms of political representation away from the productive sphere altogether. In order to mute class conflict and the disparities of wealth which divide the productive sphere, the working class is represented in the pub or the home thereby allowing it to be defined in terms of its pleasures as opposed to its productive activity. A “crime” committed by an individual member of the working class—be it theft, murder, or some act of violence—functions initially to rob working-class voices of their political legitimacy. This shift in narrative focus provides the space necessary for the construction of a “moral community,” independent of industrial production. In the end, a sense of community united under the concept of “nation” is cemented against what are perceived of as both the external and internal forces threatening its dissolution.

THE PROPHETIC VS. THE NARRATIVE

George Eliot's Felix Holt promises perhaps too much. Beginning in the memorable year 1832, it immodestly sets as its task the tracing of change in the English industrial landscape and the effects of this change on the fictional town of Treby Magna. The opening passage takes us back in time to the period immediately preceding the novel's setting, when “the glory had not yet departed from the old coach-roads” (75). Eliot compares the sights, sounds, and fullness of immediately apprehensible experience offered by the long, slow journey by coach to a future where travel will more likely resemble a “bullet” being “shot … through a tube.” Speed becomes the new determining force; that which will alter not only the landscape but our ability to relate to it as well.⁷ For Eliot, the high-speed “tube-journey's” limitations are twofold. First, it is disruptive to memory. Second, and perhaps most importantly for the task at hand, it defies representation: “The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as barren as an exclamatory O!” (75). Such a crisis of representation would seem to put Eliot's own role as writer in danger, if indeed she is to relate to us the changes in Treby Magna effected by industrialization. By setting the novel in 1832, however (although it was written in 1866), Eliot seems to want to avoid this representational impasse. By returning to this earlier period she will describe the process of this change, but not the experiences of it which are yet to come, foreseeable yet unrepresentable some time in the still indefinite future (which was actually Eliot's own present).⁸

Eliot does, however, in a sense flesh out the barren O! of this future, of how it might be experienced, by telling us what it will not be, by showing us what the coach journey is and what it offers. Taking us along with her on a hypothetical trip from Avon to Kent, Eliot gives us a vision of the English countryside verdant with over-blossoming nature and a pace of life consonant with the rhythms of rural existence; the shepherd here moves in sync with the slow pace of his grazing cattle. Twined and tendrilled with wild convolvulus, many-tubed honeysuckle, scarlet haws, deep-crimson hips, blackberry branches, pale pink dogroses, and ruby-berried nightshade, it is a landscape demarcated by the “unmarketable beauty” of traditional English hedgerows (77). Were we to catch a glimpse of the people contentedly ensconced behind these hedgerows, we would see faces begrimed with dirt; yet, lest we mistakenly confer upon this dirt a lack of moral uprightness, of wanton uncleanliness, Eliot is quick to inform us that this is not your ordinary dirt but Protestant dirt, the kind of dirt that makes its possessors clean. And these Protestants in particular are doubly scrubbed, saved as they are “from the excesses of Protestantism by not knowing how to read” (77). These are the glory days: the days before the rick-burners, the riots, and the encroachment of handlooms and mines—and with them Dissenters—on this pastoral cornucopia.

As the coach continues on its way, however, this scene passes, and we near the villages and hamlets with their coal-pits and manufacture. At this juncture, a schism is registered. Whereas those inhabitants peopling the rural countryside are “sure that old England was the best of all possible countries” (78) this manufacturing midlands' population is not so easily convinced. Indeed, the connection between the town and the country becomes hard if not impossible to discern; the traveler has literally passed from “one phase of English life to another” (79)—where dirt is no longer imbued with any great moral rectitude but is simply dirty. In this new landscape, it becomes difficult to read the signs so transparent in the agricultural regions. Whereas rural life apparently hides nothing valuable beneath its tendrils—“If there were any facts which had not fallen under their own observation, they were facts not worth observing” (78)—such transparency between vision and object becomes unsettled and disrupted once we enter the new landscape of the town. Representation itself becomes indeterminate, precariously and dangerously up for grabs by a variety of different and contradictory interpretations. Here the parson preaches a sermon invoking his parishioners to “plough up the fallow-ground of your hearts” (80) and its meaning is so opaque, so susceptible to being divergently interpreted that one group sees in it an argument for fallows and yet another sees it, au contraire, as an argument against them. Shaken by this highly unstable state of affairs, the parson simply expires in a fit of apoplexy.

Even within this potentially disruptive framework of change, however, there is a unifying force for Eliot, embodied in the figure of the coachman. That force is narrative. For what he can do—and the modern train conductor cannot—is gather stories. Because of the slow pace with which he, unlike the train, moves through the landscape the old coachman is able to gather knowledge of the landscape and its people and this, for Eliot, is the raw material of “fine stories” (83). Indeed, as Eliot assures us, there are enough stories of English life, “enough of English labours in town and country, enough aspects of earth and sky, to make episodes for a modern Odyssey” (76).

And yet already within the space of Eliot's introduction, the threat to this kind of integrated storytelling is all too evident, creeping into even the coachman's relationship to the landscape. Embittered by the railroad's invasive presence on the landscape—materialized in a vision of the countryside “strewn with shattered limbs”—the coachman lapses momentarily into his own form of apoplexy; he is rendered speechless: “[he] looked before him with the blank gaze of one who had driven his coach to the outermost edge of the universe, and saw his leaders plunging into the abyss” (81). Where once there was something to relate, now there is momentarily only blankness and silence, the inability to narrate: the “high prophetic strain” briefly takes the place of the “familiar one of narrative” (81). This “prophetic strain” is both potent and cataclysmic, foretelling a certain future of shattered limbs and destroyed inns which leads our coachman to the brink of the abyss and, significantly, the end of narrative. Represented by the railroad and its sure path of destruction, the prophetic mode is thus intimately connected to modernity itself. It figures for Eliot as all that is counter to narrative, and like the coachman's stories, Eliot's own narrative is susceptible to its powers. Threatened as it is by new forms of technology and new social forces coming into being with that technology, Eliot's story is precariously located in the interstices between two modes of storytelling: the prophetic and the narrative. As I will argue later, when Eliot, in the face of the destructive forces of industrialism, invokes her recuperative vision of national unity she ironically succumbs to the very mode of prophecy she is at such pains to forestall.

Within the context of this fast-disappearing “old-fashioned” storytelling Eliot will attempt to tell us the story of Felix Holt. Like the coach journey, Felix's story is already on the cusp, located somewhere between an old-fashioned narratability and an increasingly destabilized state of modern indeterminacy and speed. On the one hand, this is not new terrain for Eliot. Throughout her oeuvre she grapples with how to recover and draw the right connections between the past and the present; to understand the present as unfolding and evolving from the past in order to adequately see the relationship of each minute part to the whole, no matter how obscure each individual part may at first seem. On the other hand, Felix Holt breaks new ground precisely because the industrial novel's project necessarily requires the introduction of new forces existing very much in the present, namely the newly created phenomena of industrial workers and their labor.

ALL PLAY AND NO WORK

Within Felix Holt one is hard-pressed to find any direct representation of work.⁹ The way in which we learn what little we do about the workers in the novel is through negation: by looking at what the workers do when they are not on the job, we are presumably to glean some sense of who they are and what they do when they are. Thus Eliot takes us not to the mine or the factory but to the pub. It is here that we are to get our sense of the workers' lives and their “miseries,” and the relationship between the two: “One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures” (373). The scene is the Cross-Keys, the local pub where the working class enjoys its leisure-time. Upon entrance we are presented with a “fungous-featured landlord” and a “yellow sickly landlady” in an establishment pouring “doctored ale,” and reeking of “an odour of bad tobacco, and remarkably strong cheese” (373-74). Surely, if this dank, fetid atmosphere—by all accounts more suitable for the cultivation of mushrooms and mold than people's pleasures—provides the space for the workers' leisure, we are meant to be impressed with the fact that their miseries must be dreadful indeed. To drive home this point the narrator impresses upon us that in comparison to other watering-holes the Cross-Keys actually presented a “high standard of pleasure” (374).

Talk in the pub revolves around the political issues occupying the minds of Trebians, specifically the impending election and more generally the question of representation upon which it centers. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of political opportunists enlisted by each side ready to bend the ears of these working men in order to gain support for their particular candidate. One such man is Mr. Johnson, who visits the Sproxton pub with the express purpose of rallying the workers to the Radical cause of Harold Transome. In the course of buying rounds and sponging for Radical support, Mr. Johnson informs the workers of their no less than national role and importance in the upcoming elections:

“No, no: I say, as this country prospers it has more and more need of you, sirs. It can do without a pack of lazy lords and ladies, but it can never do without brave colliers. And the country will prosper. I pledge you my word, sirs, this country will rise to the tip-top of everything, and there isn't a man in it but what shall have his joint in the pot, and his spare money jingling in his pocket, if we only exert ourselves to send the right men to parliament—men who will speak up for the collier, and the stone-cutter, and the navvy” (Mr. Johnson waved his hand liberally), “and will stand no nonsense. This is a crisis, and we must exert ourselves. We've got Reform, gentlemen, but now the thing is to make Reform work. It's a crisis—I pledge you my word it's a crisis.”

(225-26)

From the venerable Mr. Johnson's speech it would appear that the interests of working men occupy a central role in the election. But as with all political prevarications it is but another example of how words do not necessarily speak the truth.¹⁰ The levels of deception are numerous. To begin with, Mr. Johnson delivers himself in the service of Harold Transome, a landowning aristocrat who has taken on the false mantle of a Radical simply by calling himself one. Moreover, the colliers and miners themselves do not yet have the vote; their role therefore, according to Mr. Johnson, is rather to amass themselves for Harold Transome by making their presence felt on election day and when the opportunity arises, attacking Transome's opponents. This appeal falls on willing ears. One worker, aptly named Dredge, overzealously takes up the pugilistic aspects of the cause and has to be rebuked, gently reminded that actual hard knocks are out of the question—although the slinging of soft muddy things would be well within bounds. In contrast to the enthusiasm the workers as a whole show for Johnson's slick speech and reasoning, our hero Felix Holt, witnessing this bravado performance, leaves the pub in disgust, loathe to hear his own heartfelt convictions (about the importance of the working man, not their enlistment as potential disrupters of the election process) travestied by such a political charlatan.

One might read this scene as a straightforward condemnation of men like Johnson who play willy-nilly with the sympathies of the working class. Certainly opportunists are one focus of the narrative's critique. But it is a double-edged critique: the ease with which Johnson can manipulate the miners' sentiments is equally if not more biting about the marked absence of political acuity in the working class. Their sympathies are to be played with so cavalierly because they lack a proper education in political know-how. They hang on the last word of Johnson's speech (crisis), for instance, not because they understand what this word means—they most surely do not, we are told—but precisely because they do not know its meaning and for this reason (or lack of reason) are thoroughly persuaded. His words convince by their very incomprehensibility. This caricature of working-class sensibility is crucial to explaining the effect the absence of industrial work has on the structure of the novel as a whole. By parodying the workers, the narrative provocatively casts suspicion on their political abilities. In the process, the question of their representation moves from the issue of their natural right to self-representation as working members of English society to an evaluation of whether, given their political immaturity, they are in a position to be able to represent themselves.¹¹ At stake becomes a valuation of political knowledge, a valuation in which the collier and miner come up woefully short. From the issue of knowledge it is then but a small step to the question of culture itself. As Eliot makes explicit in the “Address to Working Men” (a speech appended to the end of the novel and delivered in the fictive voice of Felix Holt), “degrading, barbarous pleasures” such as those of the working class are nothing less than a sign of cultural privation, of the lack of those “precious benefits” which she calls the “common estate of society.”¹² And this “common estate,” which Eliot, via the pub, shows no mere expansion of the franchise can provide, is “that treasure of knowledge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, feeling, and manners, great memories and the interpretation of great records, which is carried on from the minds of one generation to the minds of another” (621). The literary quandary of how to represent modern labor has been translated into an issue of political representation, which in turn rests on who the rightful heirs of such a conveyed tradition of culture can and should be.

Such a shift is integrally connected to the actual debates about reform in England beginning in the 1830s and continuing into the 1860s with the passing of the Second Reform Bill in 1867, just one year after Eliot wrote Felix Holt. The nature of this period of reform has been characterized by critics such as Williams and Patrick Brantlinger as one involving two distinct phases: the first, the middle-class reform of the 1830s through the mid-1850s in which political reformist action was believed to be the mechanism through which to alleviate social problems (grouped under the umbrella term the “Condition of England”) and the second, in which the optimism and energy of this earlier period of reform is replaced by the “cult of progress,” i.e. the belief in the inevitability of historical progress, of “laws” of evolution and organic growth that displace human agency as the motor of change (Williams, Problems 213-39; Brantlinger).¹³ These two phases are divided along class lines. Whereas the first Reform Bill centered on the issue of enfranchising the middle class, with the 1867 Bill the middle class found itself in a decidedly different position, possibly having to cede rather than gain power through the extension of the franchise to the working class. With the middle class in a position potentially to lose power, the political ground of reform radically shifted; the hegemony of the middle class was threatened. At this point broad issues of culture began to play a significantly larger part in English political life. Culture and its related terms—education, responsibility, moral and intellectual fitness, obligation, trust and so on—slowly came to displace questions of natural right; these cultural criteria took precedence over what properly constituted an individual's right to representation.¹⁴ Or, as Brantlinger notes, “one stood for or against a new reform bill, depending partly on one's definition of culture and on one's belief as to whether those who were to be enfranchised had enough of it or not” (239).

Curiously enough, it is this latter phase of reform that Felix Holt narrates. As the pub scenes illustrate, what is of central concern is whether the workers have the cultural capital to warrant a political right to representation. And if the caricature of their political and intellectual ineptitude were not evidence enough, the depiction of their mob violence on election day resulting, as it does, in an anarchic, seemingly politically unmotivated riot, definitively answers this concern with a resounding no.¹⁵ Thus, while Felix Holt is set in the period of crisis of the first Reform Bill of 1832, ideationally the crisis it confronts and attempts to reconcile is that of the second Reform Bill, contemporaneous with the actual period in which Eliot was writing the novel. In the narrative's own practice, then, the present is not written as a continuation of the past but rather is projected back onto the past. The collapse of present into past conflates two distinct historical moments into one moment, a moment, moreover, that as the result of the fusion must always remain an ideal.

This metaleptic return has direct consequences for Eliot's representations of work. Since the ultimate basis for political judgment rests on cultural capital, neither work nor the workplace are necessary sites for political claims to representation. Production is repressed, excluded from the status of reality. In a sense, then, it becomes not so much a question of being unable to represent work but of its seeming irrelevance to the “present” 1860s politics of culture. In the process, thirty-odd years of history are conflated, years that include, significantly, the working-class militancy of the 1840s when, from a middle-class British perspective, workers' struggle in the political form of Chartism reared its ugly head and threatened to divide the nation along class lines. The active forgetting of that which has not yet happened—given the historical setting of Felix Holt—eliminates with it the memory of class conflict.

It is precisely this attempt to purge the past of its fractious discontinuities that is necessary to constitute the nation. It is the absent space of work which will be filled by the concept of “nation,” which, unlike work, serves to unite the heterogeneous workers and middle-class citizens populating Felix Holt. In essence, the “Condition of England” question is “answered” through its supersession by culture: the nation becomes synonymous with culture, English culture, which in turn provides the ideological cement necessary to symbolically unite worker and capitalist in their mutual national identification as English.¹⁶ Much like our coachman, whose narrative was temporarily derailed by the penetration of urban capital (manifest in the railroad) into the countryside, the narrative of Felix Holt, faced with the presence of industrial labor, shifts gears, moving into a prophetic register which foretells the steady, progressive realization of a national destiny.

A second look at Mr. Johnson's speech bears out this shift in political terrain. Framed by an unquestioned belief in history as progress—“as this country prospers,” he begins—Johnson's speech mirrors the movement of reform just described, and diverts attention from labor politics per se to a national politics: “the country will prosper … will rise to the tip-top of everything.” As the future tense of his discourse appropriately emphasizes, he moves here into the prophetic mode, virtually prophesying the nation and its fortunes. This prophetic mode, as with the coachman, leaves the realm of descriptive, realistic narrative, and indeed must: the prophetic therefore constructs a political space divorced from political action and devoid of those very real conflicts which would hamper national unity. The only form of action entertained is the workers' rioting which results from a misguided and wholly unpolitical mob mentality, a mentality, it is underscored, “animated by no real political passion” (428). To the extent that the workers are thus reduced to a “mad crowd” (425), their collective subjectivity is limited to passive receivership (possibly) of England's great cultural heritage. In Arnoldian fashion, culture and its expression in the “nation” come to stand virtually in opposition to history: like Arnold's understanding of “anarchy,” history within Felix Holt is too embedded in the thick of things, too susceptible to divisions of class and ideology. Reaching across this divide, culture functions as a protective enclosure, a space where the social practices of labor are suspended. Within the weave of culture, the fabric of social relations in modern society and the abstract form of social domination intrinsic to them are severed from their socio-historical constitution in determinate, structured forms of practice.

The politics of culture in which Felix Holt is engaged, as discussed above, more properly represent the period of reform of the 1860s following the Chartist struggles of the 1840s, a period which contains within it the defeat of the first wave of working-class militancy: action on the workers' part has already been effectively quelled and overcome. When attempting to confront industrial labor, then, the narrative shifts into a register that already precludes it from social consideration. Within the text, Chartism and the alternative vision of work it carries with it is represented as an historical impossibility—though ostensibly the novel is fictively situated in 1832.

Yet Eliot does attempt to narrate a form of labor complementary to her mobilization of culture. To do so she must turn back to the past. In an attempt to reconnect figuratively the brain and the hands, to offer an alternative to the non-representability of the hands alone, Eliot leaves the domain of the industrialized working class and returns to the residual socio-economic mode of artisanal production. Mental and manual labor are combined in the figure of Felix Holt as artisan and organic intellectual. This return can be read generally as a desire to maintain social positions that are the creation of obsolete modes of production (see Marx 399-421). And, within the context of the novel, it serves to carve out an extra-economic realm seemingly independent of industrial production.

The strangeness of Felix's socio-economic markings are acknowledged in the text: “Felix was known personally, and vaguely believed to be a man who meant many queer things, not at all of an every-day kind” (427). Part of this “queerness” results from Felix's marginal position outside the economy of exchange: “He had put a stop to the making of saleable drugs, contrary to the nature of buying and selling” (465, emphasis added). From his newly created role as lower-middle-class artisan, Felix putatively escapes the snares of modernization—market relations and the instrumentality they express. On the one hand, there is a utopian element in Eliot's move back to quasi-artisanal production; a desire somehow to reestablish the fast-disappearing connection between manual and mental labor, to slow down the pace of change and resist the fragmentation threatening the cohesiveness of the rural community. Herein lies the creative performative capacity utterly denied the industrial worker. On the other hand, caught as he is in an historically outmoded economic structure and cultural form, Felix represents a regressive resistance to “modernity” itself. Like Eliot's disembodied notion of culture, he is literally “not at all of an every-day kind” (428).

In essence, the narrative's investment in him lies in the contrast he provides to the modern worker. As the fictive author of the “Address to Working Men” he advises the workers to recognize the organic, evolutionary nature of things, and therefore to “take the world as it is”; to accept the superiority of the “masters” who hold the keys to this cultural treasure, which is “the life of the nation” (621-22). In this sense, Felix Holt hovers didactically over the text as a model—of resistance to the penetration of capital and of acquiescence to a politics of class conciliation premised on a unifying vision of cultural nationalism. To expose the ideologies and discourses of modern nationalism and its construction within bourgeois culture is to discover the traces of the repressed history contained in (the absence of) industrial labor.

LOVE'S LABORS

Just as the division between work and culture presupposed a reconfiguration of the relation between external and internal (the workers, potentially external forces of disruption, are “internalized” within the boundaries of English culture), the relation of England to its other “Others”—the Orientalized East—operates through the construction of internal/external boundaries of mutual exclusivity. The Orient enters Felix Holt in the guise of Harold Transome, who arrives back on England's shores at the beginning of the novel. We learn little about Harold's exploits while he has been away in Greece save for the fact that he has accumulated large sums of money and an heir. While the actual source of Harold's money is left unspecified, we do know that his experience abroad has reshaped his views on the processes of modernization at home. The apparent (and grossly stereotypical) slothfulness of the Easterner serves to justify conveniently the self-interested practices of competitive English commerce:

If you had lived in the East, as I have, you would be more tolerant. More tolerant, for example, of an active industrious selfishness, such as we have here, though it may not always be quite scrupulous: you would see how much better it is than an idle selfishness.

(275)

This selfish industriousness which Harold espouses is sharply contrasted to Felix's resistance to market forces. Indeed the dichotomous positions they hold mark the alternative visions of work that organize Felix Holt. These alternatives, like those represented by the shift from production to pleasure when dealing with the workers, are mapped appetitively by the opposite pleasures each affords. If Felix Holt turns to the pub to explore workers' pleasures, when looking for bourgeois pleasures its haunt is (figuratively) the bedroom, the realm of sexual desire. Through the central female figure of Esther Lyon we are given a litmus test for evaluating the different pleasures identified with Harold and Felix and the alternative social visions manifest in them.¹⁷

Throughout the novel Esther functions as a liminal figure. In terms of her class identification, she can be read as the representative petit bourgeois. The product of an aristocrat and a sailor, she operates from within an indeterminate class position, liable to be as swayed by the class interests of the aristocracy (in the figure of Harold Transome) as by those of the working class (identified falsely, as we have seen, with Felix Holt). Esther's sexual desires and her eventual capitulation to Felix serve as cautionary political allegory. Torn between Felix and Harold Transome, Esther's ultimate acceptance of Felix mirrors the transformation desired by the text for the working class. They, like Esther, the message seems to say, should accept their proper function within the body politic, that of accommodation to current social conditions in the interests of the health of the nation as a whole.

The mechanics whereby the gendered body of Esther is made part of this “organic” national body reveals the violence and domination underlying the seemingly benign picture of accommodation. Specifically, the romantic plot of Felix Holt makes explicit the link between culture and power, a link obfuscated in the realm of work and production. By looking at how power circulates through the figure of Esther we can recover the missing link, the (repressed) body, upon which English culture and imperial power is written.

Esther spends the greater part of the novel in a condition of conflicted indecisiveness, at a juncture where she must choose between the initially illusive pleasures and privileges of the aristocratic “queenly” life and the hardworking, duty-bound self-sacrificing ethic of Felix's artisanal “vocation.” Thanks to the convoluted legal subplot of entail which cedes to Esther legitimate rights to the Transome estate and with it any potential cross-class sexual conflict, Esther can make what looks like a voluntary choice between her two lovers. It is crucial that this is a voluntary choice; what is at stake is the principle of self-regulation.

On one level, Esther's education, her private journey through successive stages of personal development, can be read as a microcosm of the modern narrative of “inevitable progress” as she learns to discard the Romantic texts she initially identifies with in favor of the “realism” Felix Holt embodies—a process built upon a necessary disillusionment, and moving toward the “disinterested objectivity” of scientific rationality:

The favourite Byronic heroes were beginning to look something like last night's decorations seen in the sober dawn … if Felix Holt were to love her, her life would be exalted into something quite new—into a sort of difficult blessedness, such as one may imagine in beings who are conscious of painfully growing into the possession of higher powers.

(327)¹⁸

Romanticism is clearly not the suitable genre for this awakening. The final death knell to any sort of Romantic utopia comes when Esther's vision of Oriental love is shattered by Harold's informing her that his Greek wife had been a slave: “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). The identification of Harold as Giaour is an odd one. At once it both situates him within an Oriental narrative—as Christian, no doubt, but labeled as such from within a non-Christian, Muslim perspective, and it radically severs Esther's identification with that narrative. The moment the Orient, even if only metaphorically, takes on flesh and blood, the pleasures it seemed to afford Esther lose their allure. So much so that when Harold names Esther “the empress of [her] own fortunes—and more besides,” a rather befuddled Esther replies: “Dear me … I don't think I know very well what to do with my empire” (501).

While Esther will ultimately reject this role of empress, Harold's relationship to her maps the novel's vision of East/West relations. As the revelation that Harold's wife was a slave makes clear, the validation of the English woman comes through the dehumanization of the non-European woman. The contrast is meant to show Esther that “her own place was peculiar and supreme” (541). At the same time, however, the situating of Harold's Eastern experience in Greece, as opposed to India or Africa, falsely separates Harold's venture from the British imperial enterprise. Harold is figured more as an adventurer than a colonist or imperial administrator, thereby separating the work of empire from its socioeconomic moorings. What these two figurations suggest is a subtle distinction between different operations of cultural and economic power. When such force is meted out genteelly in the interests of its larger (legitimatizing) cultural project then it appears to lose its nasty repressive edge and regain its status as lofty “cultured” ideal. As Esther remarks about Harold Transome's mode of governance on his own estate, what is so impressive is the naturalness—due to his gender—of his domination, “the masculine ease with which he governed everybody and administered everything about him, without the least harshness, and with a facile good-nature which yet was not weak” (524). Any show of brute force or direct repression, however, must remain invisible. In other words, Harold's attempt simultaneously to devalue the worth of his Eastern wife and increase Esther's value backfires precisely because of the directness of exchange it exposes. The entrance of money and, with it, an openly exploitative exercise of power demystifies the more finely veiled traffic in women in the patriarchal kinship system.

Against the individual and opportunistic pleasures driving Harold's sexual pursuits, the text invites us to see Esther's final union with Felix as the opting for an “authentic” culture, unsullied by the crude and instrumental market forces of buying and selling. Yet the mechanics of their union, rather than providing any real alternative to such forces, simply dresses up the workings of cultural domination in a finer, more veiled frippery. For what Esther chooses in Felix is nothing short of the Law:

He was like no one else to her: he had seemed to bring at once a law, and the love that gave strength to obey the law. … The first religious experience of her life—the first self-questioning, the first voluntary subjection, the first longing to acquire the strength of greater motives and obey the more strenuous rule—had come to her through Felix Holt. No wonder that she felt as if the loss of him were inevitable backsliding.

(369, emphasis added)

Esther is successively “stung,” “shaken in her self-contentment,” filled with mortification and anger, and the “sense of a terrible power over her that Felix seemed to have as his angry words vibrated through her”—feelings that become “almost too much for her self-control” (212). And, on the next page: “she revolted against his assumption of superiority, yet she felt herself in a new kind of subjection to him. He was ill-bred, he was rude, he had taken an unwarrantable liberty; yet his indignant words were a tribute to her: he thought she was worth more pains that the women of whom he took no notice” (213). In short, Felix, as pedagogue and master, wields the phallus and penetrates Esther's being, causing her to accept her own lawless lack in her voluntary subjection to his superiority. Crucial to our reading of Esther's education and its relation to the culture of imperialism is the way in which this process of personal subjection is internal, regulated by the self, and involving a recognition on Esther's part that she is indeed inferior to Felix and thus subject to his superior powers. Such internal regulation conveniently alleviates the necessity of external repression altogether as the “colonizer”—in this case, Felix—is thoroughly absorbed into the consciousness of the “colonized.” As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue, Oedipus is the figurehead of a psychology that corresponds well to such an imperialism. It is “colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even here at home … it is our intimate colonial education” (170). In a word, Oedipus is what teaches us to desire our own repression.¹⁹ The culmination of this colonial mentality is achieved when Esther finally relates to Felix's words as if they were her own, realizing that they “at last seemed strangely to fit her own experience” (556).

The powerlessness inherent in such a recognition is clearly marked in the novel as a condition specific to women. In this respect, Eliot is often heralded by critics for her proto-feminist representations of the plight of women in patriarchal society.²⁰ But her understanding of the desires denied women is itself equally problematic. That is, for Eliot, there is a fundamental connection between power and culture that remains unquestioned: the desire to rule or to dominate is never in and of itself critiqued; instead it is always a question of how that rule is exercised. And when that rule is suitably cloaked in a domesticated, naturalized hierarchy of duties or functions, it masks any relation to the naked power relations underlying its operation. Indeed, at the end of the novel, Eliot recreates Esther's and Felix's past for us, to the extent that all of Esther's feelings of subjection and humiliation become but pleasant lover's pleasures: “They smiled at each other, with the old sense of amusement they had so often had together” (557). It is just such pleasure, entailed in Eliot's version of “authentic” culture, that greases the machinery of domination, both on England's shores and beyond. This vision of domestic pleasure, so clearly meant to offset that other image of pleasure which Felix Holt gives us, that of the miners and their pubs, more potently underscores the way in which pleasure itself, and with it labor—whether in the direct form of economic domination or the more mediated domain of culture—is severed from reality, excluded from the public sphere, by the mechanisms of power fueling England's cultural project of nationhood.

PROPHESYING THE NATION

In his study of the Bildungsroman, Franco Moretti reads Felix Holt as symptomatic of the end of this symbolic form which “had always held fast to the notion that the biography of a young individual was the most meaningful viewpoint for the understanding and the evaluation of history” (227). This form, now insufficient to the new project at hand—the representation of the masses or the “collective”—is superseded by one in which the individual figures merely as a part of the whole. Within such a framework, Felix's vocation is seen as originating from an “ethnic or social partiality.” Once the biography of the individual can no longer capture history, the narrative opts for the building of enclaves or sub-cultures which preserve “communal” values at odds with the larger dynamics of the “great world.” This transition occurs as an effect of larger historical processes, namely the sacrifice of individuality which typifies the “age of the masses.” For Moretti, then, the failure of Felix Holt as a novel rests in the conflict between these two structures: Eliot, by attempting to tell her tale of the masses, yet with only the worn-out, historically outdated narrative form of the Bildungsroman at her disposal, is unable ultimately to represent her collective subject. Her novel, flawed not from lack of writerly skill, but because it lies on the cusp of a historical transition, marks this transition that has not yet found a form adequate to its representation.

But what this analysis fails to take into account is the way in which Eliot sets the partiality of Felix's view and the domain of his actions within the larger social dynamic of change and progress. As the “Address to Working Men” impresses upon us it is precisely in the interests of society, of Gesellschaft as Gemeinschaft that “revolutionary” views such as those identified with an organized working class must be domesticated within the confines of a national English culture. In order to ensure the survival of the social organism, to use Eliot's own metaphors of organicism, each part must recognize and perform its function in relation to the body as a whole. Within such an organic view of the nation, there can be no cultivation of sub-cultures, for each part of necessity is always integral to and inseparable from the whole. Rather in the interests of this national body, of nationalism, the validation of what Moretti reads as the sub-culture of Felix's position must remain sub.

One final indication of the shift from a regional communal identification to a broadly British nationalist one is evident in the inscription which opens Felix Holt:

“Upon the Midlands now the industrious muse doth fall,
The shires which we the heart of England well may call.
My native country those, which so brave spirits has bred,
If there be virtues yet remaining in thy Earth,
Or any good of thine thou bred'st into my birth,
Accept it as thine own, whilst now I sing of thee,
Of all thy later brood the unworthiest though I be.”

(74)

This poem, a slightly altered version of a passage from The Thirteenth Song of Drayton's Poly-Olbion, contains a significant revision. Whereas Drayton speaks of only one “shire”—Warwickshire—Eliot harkens to a plurality of shires; these shires together comprise her “native country” of England. In essence, Eliot remakes this poem about regional pride into something akin to a national anthem. Much like the narrative of Felix Holt as a whole, the present is here rewritten in the past with all traces of difference or conflict essentially erased.

In a sense, then, nationalism, or the identification of oneself as part of a nation, is the linchpin between (the dissolution of) community and the modern state. In place of the ruptures and discontinuities of self and community, national identification reinscribes a notion of wholeness and continuity. As such, nationalism is that which mediates between the seemingly knowable past and an unknowable present and future. It is that which bridges the representational gap in Felix Holt, the tension between the prophetic and the narrative.

In the novel, as we have seen, this mediation takes two forms: the one, represented by the figure of Felix Holt himself, functions by dint of his placement in a realm removed from daily life. The other, represented by Esther, and by extension the working class, gives us a brief glimpse of another possibility, of the existence of chaotic desires, of a discontinuous sense of self, of the nonidentity of reason and reality, subjects and objects, of the internal splits and ruptures that make Esther feel as if her thoughts and her life were a “heap of fragments.” It is this possibility that the prophetic register of Felix Holt shuts down; the force of Eliot's text works to bind these fragments together into a unified form. Hence the crucial role of education in the novel: Esther and the working class require education precisely in order to bring them within the national fold. In the face of an unnarratable, unrepresentable present, Eliot slips into the prophetic mode; she must prophesy the unity of a nation to be created. Thus, whereas the prophetic mode in which Felix Holt functions writes an uninterrupted history of progress in the guise of culture, the narrative process of integration—of both the workers as a class and Esther as a woman—into that history reveals a residue of labors and pleasures yet to be redeemed. While at some level, Eliot's Felix Holt registers this uncomfortable fit—between labor and pleasure, between the narrative and the prophetic—it ultimately resolves such discomfort by rendering invisible that which does not “fit.” In this sense, Felix Holt truly is a modern Odyssey: like Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the dialectic of Enlightenment, Felix Holt enacts a narrative of instrumental rationality which defines labor narrowly in the realm of a capitalist work ethic that by its very nature denies pleasure and desire.

Notes

1. Jameson, in the context of discussing Lukács's conception of totality, refers to the notion of ideology it posits in terms of strategies of containment. As Jameson argues, “Lukács's achievement was to have understood that such strategies of containment—which Marx himself described principally in his critiques of classical political economy and the ingenious frames the latter constructed in order to avoid the ultimate consequences of such insights as the relationship between labor and value—can be unmasked only by confrontation with the ideal of totality which they at once imply and repress” (53).

2. Recent feminist post-structuralist critics have attempted to address this problem, specifically in relation to the construction of the nineteenth-century novel. Armstrong, for example, tries to bring the public and private spheres, politics and sexuality, back into relation by historicizing the split between them. She argues that it was precisely during the nineteenth century that the project of gendering subjectivity outside of and separate from “politics” acquired its political significance. She goes on then to claim primacy for the domestic front as the privileged site of ideological battle (and eventual victory) for middle-class dominance.

3. Given this exclusion, Negt and Kluge characterize the bourgeois public sphere as “an illusory synthesis of the totality of society” (73). They posit that this synthesis is premised significantly on the denial of large realms of social experience outside of or counter to the bourgeois public sphere, namely the self-experience of the masses, whose experience constitutes an alternative or proletarian public sphere. As Negt and Kluge describe this process of disqualification, “the proletarian context of living does not as such lose its experiential value; however, the experience bound up in it is rendered ‘incomprehensible’ in terms of social communication: ultimately, it becomes a private experience” (18).

4. For a discussion tracing our critical lineage back to Arnold and the autonomy he assigns culture, see Gallagher 219-67.

5. There are any number of examples later in the century of the thematic of the colonial invading England's island, ranging from Sherlock Holmes detective stories (see especially Doyle, The Sign of Four [107-205]) to narratives of the Englander “gone native.” Like representations of the working class in the industrial novel, they reflect a palpable sense of cultural anxiety over the breaking down of clearly demarcated internal/external social and spatial boundaries.

6. This series of displacements from the sphere of production to the domestic and national spheres typifies the structure of the industrial novel generally. Industrial novels exemplifying such a dynamic include Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, and Charles Dickens's Hard Times.

7. In 1841 a rapid coach from London to Exeter took eighteen hours. In 1845 the same journey by rail express took six and a half hours (Beales 114).

8. This distinction between the process and experience of change is crucial to how Eliot will attempt to represent history in the novel, something I develop later in the essay. In its simplest form, this distinction involves the difference between reading the process or history of change as a diachronic, continuous narrative of development and progress and seeing history as a series of fragments and ruptures, as a narrative of discontinuity in which the past is not simply passively read to confirm the present. I am here drawing on the work of Benjamin who distinguishes these two readings of the relationship between past and present as the difference between historicism and historical materialism. Whereas historicism, for Benjamin, “gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past,” historical materialism “supplies a unique experience with the past” (262).

9. In the face of the general absence of literary representations of industrial work and industrial workers, Robbins suggests that we need to look elsewhere for representations of “the people,” namely to the depiction of servants. But as I will argue it is this very absence which shapes how the realist novel represents “the people.”

10. The epigraph to this chapter opens with the following poem about truth: “Truth is the precious harvest of the earth. / But once, when harvest waved upon a land, / The noisome cankerworm and caterpillar, / Locusts, and all the swarming foul-born broods, / Fastened upon it with swift, greedy jaws, / And turned the harvest into pestilence, / Until men said, What profits it to sow?” (215).

11. When John Blackwood sent Eliot her proofs of “Address to Working Men” he added a note clarifying that the charge that the new franchise makes the working man the master was made as a sarcasm in the House. Eliot responded in a letter on December 7, 1867: “I agree with you about the phrase, ‘masters of the country.’ I wrote that part twice, and originally I distinctly said that the epithet was false. Afterwards I left that out, preferring to make a stronger argumentum ad hominem in case any workman believed himself a future master” (Haight 339).

12. It was at the behest of her publisher that Eliot wrote the “Address to Working Men” in November, 1867. Blackwood got the idea after hearing Disraeli's Edinburgh “address to the working men” in defense of the Second Reform Bill. In terms of the larger argument I am making as to the ambivalent narration of past and present in Felix Holt, the significance of the address lies in its historical continuity with the novel. Whereas the novel purportedly portrays the changes of 1832, its formal concerns are those of the 1860s.

13. Although there is a slight discrepancy in the time frames of Williams and Brantlinger, the distinction they draw is essentially the same: the first period of reform is identified with middle-class rights and the ensuing crisis of Chartism in the 1840s, and the second with the crisis of suffrage surrounding the second Reform Bill. In the following discussion of the rising importance of culture in debates about reform I am paraphrasing Brantlinger's argument. Hobsbawm also notes the shift in class alliances but in the broader context of Europe as a whole. In terms of continental politics he marks 1848 as a turning point for the bourgeoisie. As he argues, 1848 failed because ultimately the struggle was not between the old regimes and the “forces of progress,” but rather between “order” and social revolution. Moderate liberals made the discovery that revolution was dangerous, and that their economic demands could be met without it, i.e. through reform: the bourgeoisie had ceased to be a revolutionary class (349-62). On the significance of 1848, see also Lukács 171-250.

14. Moretti interestingly traces this emphasis on cultural continuity back to the singular nature of the English Revolution, suggesting that 1642 and 1688 figured as “revolutionary” in the etymological sense of the word: rather than a revolutionary break between an aristocratic past and a newly-emerging bourgeois present (as in France 1789), the English Revolution reestablished or restored rights deemed temporarily lost, circling back toward English origins not forward to a revolutionary new future. In the context of the development and analysis of the Bildungsroman, Moretti argues that this had profound effects on the British form of this genre (181-228).

15. The very vocabulary Eliot uses when describing the mob and its riot indicates the force of its threat to ordered society. The mob is variously described as “a mad crowd,” a “mass of wild chaotic desires and impulses,” and “unreasoning men,” filled with “destructive spirit,” “blind [outrage]” and raising the spectre of “horror” should they not be “diverted from any further attack on places where they would get in the midst of intoxicating and inflammable materials” (424-27). Against this chaos of desire and impulse, the “civil force” of Treby Magna “prepared themselves to struggle for order,” whose essence lay primarily in protecting the private property most likely to be destroyed by this mass.

16. Hall convincingly argues that the reconstitution of the English nation as a result of the Reform Act of 1867 cannot be understood outside the context of Empire, “for it was impossible to think about the ‘mother country’ and its specificities without reference to the colonies.” As she demonstrates through the chain of connections she draws between Birmingham, England, Britain and Jamaica, “there was a deep-rooted and widely shared set of assumptions which cut across Radical and Tory that England was without doubt the greatest, the most advanced and the most civilized nation of all time. The colonies demonstrated this for they were possessed and civilized by the English” (10).

17. Interestingly enough, this choice is also distinguished through a literary metaphor as the choice between two different genres, reflected in Esther's comment to Harold that “[he is] quite in another genre” (540).

18. Chapter 43, in which Esther explores her primary feeling of just such subjection before Felix, begins with an epigraph of two stanzas of Tennyson's In Memoriam, the second of which harkens “Dear friend, far off, my lost desire, / So far, so near, in woe and weal; / O, loved the most when most I feel / There is a lower and a higher!” (522). Once again, this illustrates the kind of naturalized hierarchy that is continually being reestablished on different levels of the narrative, be it the economic, the social, the cultural, or the moral.

19. The end of Felix Holt closes with the classic image of Oedipal triangulation: the producing of a “young Felix” in the last sentence of the novel completes the “daddy-mommy-me” triangle and moreover, ensures the reproduction of “oedipal” power, which here takes the particular form of scientific rationality: “There is a young Felix, who has a great deal more science than his father, but not much more money” (606).

20. See, for instance, Barrett, Uglow, and Beer. In his foreword to Cottom's book on Eliot, Eagleton as well suggests that Eliot's representations of sex and gender surpass the simple project of class hegemony (viii-xvii).

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