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Why Political Novels Have Heroines: Sybil, Mary Barton, and Felix Holt

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SOURCE: “Why Political Novels Have Heroines: Sybil, Mary Barton, and Felix Holt” in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 18, No. 2, Winter, 1985, pp. 126-44.

[In the following essay, Yeazell suggests that the narratives of courtship of the Victorian era repress the violence of class conflict and social change.]

Beginning with Richardson's beleaguered young women, the history of many an English heroine turns on those critical moments at which she cannot speak until spoken to—which is to say that she is the subject of a courtship plot, and subject to its conventional constraints. Though “her lot is made for her,” as George Eliot succinctly puts it, “by the love she accepts,”1 a properly modest heroine should do little actively to encourage that love, indeed should think as little as possible about it. The code of feminine behavior, in short, postulates a young woman who is least aggressive, often in fact least conscious, precisely where she has most at stake. Stated thus baldly, this code is almost impossibly contradictory, and even the most stereotyped heroine is bound in some measure to violate it. What I wish to investigate here, however, is not so much the tensions and ambiguities that the courtship plot itself may generate, as the reliance on the conventions of this plot by novelists who would initially seem to have a very different sort of history in mind. It is not immediately clear what the Condition of England—an England in the throes of economic and political change—has to do with a young woman's courtship. “If you think of a novel in the vague you think of a love interest,” as E. M. Forster observed;2 and perhaps a generic “love interest” arises inevitably even when the English novelist sets out to study the sufferings of the poor or the threat of revolutionary violence. Or one could argue that Sybil and Mary Barton were finally named after their heroines—or that North and South, to choose a related instance, was once called “Margaret Hale”—only because it was a frequent practice among novelists of the period to bestow the name of an individual character, especially of a woman, on their fictions. But it is precisely the implications of such narrative practices that I wish to explore. Why should a Sybil, Mary Barton, or Felix Holt subordinate its social and political story to a “love interest”? What sort of “cover”—to ask a more tendentious question—does the innocent heroine provide?

The apparent messages of the three novels vary widely, ranging over a broad spectrum of Victorian belief. Benjamin Disraeli's idiosyncratic campaign for Young England, his bizarrely feudal vision of a new union between the aristocracy and the People, seems far removed from the Christian reconciliation of individual masters and men that Elizabeth Gaskell urges in Mary Barton; and neither very much resembles George Eliot's patient trust in the efficacy of school teachers and the gradual enlightenment of “public opinion.” Politically, Sybil, Mary Barton, and Felix Holt, the Radical seem united only by a similar fear—a deep anxiety about the growing division between classes and its potential for deadly violence. That these works actually imagine men dying of class conflict, as they rarely do even in the other “industrial” novels of the period, is the most obvious sign of that anxiety.3 But there are more kinships among these narratives than such an account of their politics would seem to suggest, and their common reliance on certain assumptions about women and sexuality has more to do with the dying men than might at first appear. Each of these novels entertains the possibility of violence, even half-sympathizes with it, only to take refuge at critical moments in the representation of female innocence, exchanging a politically dangerous man for a sexually unaggressive young woman, and a narrative that threatens drastic change for one that proves reassuringly static. Freud would later argue that by repressing woman's sexual consciousness, “civilized” morality unfortunately produced in her a general fear of “any form of thinking”: the “prohibition of thought” that begins with the requirement that the young girl remain sexually ignorant until marriage inevitably extends itself beyond the sexual field, and becomes, in Freud's view, a pervasive blankness. But when the idea of violent change threatens, “this artificial retardation” of woman's development4 can provide the novelist with consoling models of delay, and a heroine's unconsciousness can seem inspired. Though the courtship of a modest heroine may make for a “love interest” that is not terribly interesting, that very absence of excitement has its function. Social and political anxieties are contained—and eased—in the narrative of such a courtship.

I. SENSELESS AND A WOMAN

Disraeli's genius was perhaps better suited to the invention of political slogans than of heroines, and the subtitle of Sybil, or The Two Nations has proved more memorable than Sybil herself. But if Sybil frequently resembles an icon rather than a woman, the icon has a central place in the novel's design. She first enters the novel and encounters the hero in a grand piece of operatic staging: the setting is a ruined abbey at sunset, and the first sign of a woman's presence is her disembodied voice—a voice of “almost supernatural sweetness,” singing an evening hymn to the Virgin.5 When Egremont actually sees her, the singer appears as an anonymous “female form” framed in the “vacant and star-lit arch” of the abbey (II, v, 97). This is not love at first sight so much as revelation—and it is a revelation that follows immediately on the first sounding of the political theme.

Visiting his older brother, Lord Marney, the hero arrives on the very day that “the torch of the incendiary had for the first time been introduced into the parish” and the “primest” ricks on the estate burned (II, iii, 84). Wandering on the grounds the next afternoon, he talks about hard times with a local farmer and his sullen hind, broods on the suffering of the poor, and encounters in the abbey ruins two strangers, whom he engages in conversation. The two lament the destruction of the monasteries, arguing that “as long as the monks existed, the people, when aggrieved, had property on their side” (II, v, 93); the younger particularly insists on the modern loss of community. “But, say what you like,” Egremont finally responds, “our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed.”

“Which nation?” asked the younger stranger, “for she reigns over two.” The stranger paused; Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly.


“Yes,” resumed the younger stranger after a moment's interval. “Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”


“You speak of—” said Egremont, hesitatingly.


“the rich and the poor.”


At this moment a sudden flush of rosy light, suffusing the grey ruins, indicated that the sun had just fallen; and through a vacant arch that over-looked them, alone in the resplendent sky, glittered the twilight star. The hour, the scene, the solemn stillness and the softening beauty, repressed controversy, induced even silence. The last words of the stranger lingered in the ear of Egremont; his musing spirit was teeming with many thoughts, many emotions; when from the Lady Chapel there rose the evening hymn to the Virgin. A single voice; but tones of almost supernatural sweetness; tender and solemn, yet flexible and thrilling. (II, v, 96)

The solemn orchestration of the scene is striking, even for Disraeli: no sooner is the troubling note of division struck than it seems to call forth, antiphonally, the responsive and soothing voice. Sybil appears as if magically summoned by the stranger's words, manifesting herself like the ancient prophetesses whom she resembles in name. “Egremont might for a moment have been pardoned for believing her a seraph, that had lighted on this sphere, or the fair phantom of some saint haunting the sacred ruins of her desecrated fane” (II, v, 97). Sybil will not always arrive quite so divinely on cue, nor will her mere imminence inevitably guarantee that “controversy,” in Disraeli's telling phrase, is “repressed.” The novelist is careful to remind us that she is human—her voice is “almost” supernaturally sweet, and Egremont's belief in a seraph is only a hypothetical, and pardonable, illusion. But the relations operatically underlined in this scene will continue to inform the novel's rhetoric and plotting, especially at moments of crisis. Posing the problem of political division and violence, Disraeli's narrative will respond with hymns to a virgin.

Egremont soon learns that the mysterious singer is “a daughter of the people” (IV, xv, 336)—and more immediately, of Walter Gerard, a workman at a cotton factory and the older of the two strangers he encountered in the ruins. The aristocratic hero nonetheless falls in love with the worker's daughter. But with a “tender inflexibility,” Sybil rejects his advances: “‘Believe me,’ she said, ‘the gulf is impassable’” (337). Disraeli presents his two lovers as obvious metonyms for the “two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy,” and the remainder of the novel essentially counterpoints their gradual coming together against the struggle to bridge the gulf between Rich and Poor in more overtly political and even violent ways.

Gerard goes to London as a Chartist delegate and when the Charter is rejected, turns increasingly toward conspiracy and violence; he and his fellow conspirators are eventually arrested at a secret meeting, just after he has proposed that the people arm themselves to resist the troops and the police. Like Gerard, Sybil begins as a loyal advocate of the People's cause: “All I desire, all I live for, is to soothe and support him in his great struggle,” she proudly announces; “and I should die content if the People were only free, and a Gerard had freed them” (IV, vi, 285). But the closer the father comes to his “fatal specific of physical force,” as she calls it (III, v, 210), the less specific becomes the daughter's awareness of what he is up to—and the more the narrative focuses instead on her growing recognition of her love for Egremont. It is typical of Disraeli's plotting that Sybil's initial rejection of Egremont's proposal immediately precedes the “terrible news” of the Birmingham riots (V, i, 339): “the party of violence” has triumphed (343), and Sybil is troubled by “the dark apprehension that her father was in some manner implicated in this movement” (344). Though she knows clearly enough how to judge the Birmingham events—“these are riots in which you are involved,” Sybil declares to Gerard, “not revolutions” (V, iii, 357)—she and the narrative both remain consolingly vague about just how he is “implicated.” When “this child of innocence and divine thoughts” (V, v, 371) tries to alert the conspirators to their impending arrest, she barely manages to utter her warning before complete unconsciousness overtakes her. The police follow directly, their lantern illuminating a static tableau: “The light fell upon a group that did not move; the father holding the hand of his insensible child, while he extended his other arm as if to preserve her from the profanation of the touch of the invaders” (V, viii, 390). In the midst of masculine conspiracy, Sybil lies as the very figure of embodied innocence, her remoteness from the others' talk of violence dramatically confirmed by the fact that she is, as one of them puts it, “senseless, and a woman!” (392).

Before he has left for his sinister meeting, Gerard has already predicted his severance from his daughter. To Sybil's pleas that he return home, he has responded harshly: “I have no home. … if the people will struggle, I will struggle with them; and die, if need be, in the front. Nor will I be deterred from my purpose by the tears of a girl” (V, iii, 359-60). No sooner does political violence threaten one domestic refuge than the novel moves its heroine decisively toward another, all the while securing her from any aggressive responsibility for her choice. Gerard's departure is promptly followed by a second and crucial proposal scene. The suitor this time is not Egremont but the radical journalist, Stephen Morley; and it is only by refusing his impassioned overtures that Sybil obliquely reveals her love for the hero. Long jealous of Egremont, Morley accuses her of carrying on “assignations” with his noble rival, a charge that threatens to taint her, I would argue, with the sexual equivalent of the paternal and political crime. But Disraeli's heroine is reassuringly free of any such dangerous will: even while the conspirators deliberately and secretly meet, she calmly reports that she encountered Egremont merely “by hazard” in a public park (V, iv, 364-65). When Morley desperately resorts to blackmail, offering to save her father only if she will reward him with her favor, Sybil accuses him of “pollution” and indignantly refuses “in the name of the holy Virgin” (368). To Morley's final maneuver, a pledge that he will save Gerard if she will swear never to give her “heart or hand” to Egremont, Sybil begins to reply, and the consequences of her effort close the scene:

“I swear that I will never give my hand to—”


“And your heart, your heart,” said Morley eagerly. “Omit not that. Swear by the holy oaths again you do not love him. She falters! Ah! She blushes!” For a burning brightness now suffused the cheek of Sybil. “She loves him,” exclaimed Morley wildly, and he rushed franticly from the room. (V, iv, 369)

It is Morley, significantly, who speaks her love: the modest heroine approaches passion only by an absent negative and by the color that involuntarily suffuses her cheek.6 Before we are given the People's talk of “insurrections” (V, viii, 387), we are granted this consoling image of the People's daughter, and the confirmation of her passive allegiance weighs against their threats of defiance. While the father plots armed resistance, the daughter silently confesses to her love for an aristocrat.

Sybil's indignant refusal to compromise her purity even to save another's life recalls Isabella's stern determination in Measure for Measure. But the moral ambiguities of such a gesture have no part in Disraeli's narrative, which unequivocally endorses her virginal rejection of Morley's advances. When Sybil first manifests herself in the abbey ruins, she appears “in the habit of a Religious” (II, v, 97); having been raised in a convent, she plans to take up the veil. Disraeli's scheme requires that she abandon the nunnery for marriage—but that she nonetheless carry with her the static innocence of the nun. Against the danger of revolution, his rhetoric repeatedly poses her emblematic resistance to change. When the lovers first embrace, the event is narrated through the innocent consciousness of the woman—which is to say that the force that draws them together is modestly obscured:

As in some delicious dream, when … there comes at last some wild gap in the flow of fascination, and by means which we cannot trace, and by an agency which we cannot pursue, we find ourselves in some enrapturing situation that is as it were the ecstasy of our life; so it happened now, that … by some mystical process which memory could not recall, Sybil found herself pressed to the throbbing heart of Egremont, nor shrinking from the embrace which expressed the tenderness of his devoted love! (V, ix, 400)

The code of female modesty requires that the heroine's consciousness know no passion, even, apparently, as she surrenders to it. By reproducing the gaps and evasions in Sybil's awareness, the narration preserves her mental innocence. And by representing the scene from her point of view, it preserves its own innocence as well: the lovers are joined by “an agency which we cannot pursue.”

They will not embrace again until the close of the novel, and then only after Egremont has repelled a violent mob, several of whom have abandoned their fiery attack on Mowbray castle to threaten Sybil obscurely with murder or gang-rape. In these climactic scenes the revolutionary impulse has inevitably degenerated into drunken riot and sexual violence—what Disraeli significantly calls the mob's “licentious rage” (VI, vii, 449). “One ruffian had grasped the arm of Sybil, another had clenched her garments,” when an officer hurries to the rescue:

Her assailants were routed, they made a staggering flight; the officer turned round and pressed Sybil to his heart.


“We will never part again,” said Egremont.


“Never,” murmured Sybil. (VI, xii, 491-92)

The heroine's virtue is preserved by the official representative of the state, and the lovers celebrate their union by conventionally negating all future change.

Like each of the novels to be examined here, Sybil contains its political action within a courtship plot and appears to substitute private for public transformations: rich and poor are united in marriage, though the Nations themselves remain Two. But even so limited a representation of class mobility and change is partly called into question by Disraeli's genealogical plotting—for in this magnificently complacent romance, the daughter of the People turns out to have been an aristocrat all along. In the opening chapters Egremont defies his older brother's advice to woo Lady Joan Mowbray, a wealthy heiress, and instead pursues the beautiful Sybil; at the novel's close the “Lady Sybil” proves the rightful owner of the Mowbray property, and Egremont, his brother now dead, inherits the title and lands of Lord Marney. This is not the bridging of the gulf between Two Nations but the endogamous union of old families and great estates: “there are not three peers in the kingdom,” we are confidently told of the new Lord Marney, “who have so much a year clear” (VI, xiii, 493).

II. TRUE LOVE IS EVER MODEST

The union of Sybil's hero and heroine coincides with the death of the heroine's father, who falls as he had predicted, his “indignant spirit” resisting an assault on the People. Walter Gerard tries to restrain the rioting mob, but when the regiment attacks, he strikes down a trooper and is instantly shot dead in his turn. Disraeli's fable owes much to the example of Scott, and its rules require that such a dangerously sympathetic figure be put safely away.7 No time is lost in executing the narrative law: one sentence recounts the death of his victim, and the next disposes of Gerard himself, pausing only long enough to name him “the real friend and champion of the People” before it cuts off his life (VI, xii, 489). The narrator hastily rushes over Sybil's grief for him as well, moving in a single paragraph form her discovery of the fatal encounter to her bridal day and Italian honeymoon. “We must drop a veil over the anguish which its inevitable and speedy revelation brought to the daughter of Gerard,” he solemnly announces (VI, xiii, 494), confirming by this final access of decorum the usefulness of a tender heroine.

When a similar veil drops in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, the novelist more subtly attributes the evasion to her heroine's own psychology. Mary Barton too has discovered that her beloved father is a political assassin—and understandably longs not to know what she knows: “a black veil being drawn over her father's past, present, and future life … her mind unconsciously sought after some action in which she might engage. Any thing, any thing, rather than leisure for reflection.”8 Gaskell's plot provides ample grounds for her heroine's unconscious wish to escape reflection. Mary's father, like Sybil's, is a mill worker who has been driven by the terrible suffering of the people and the frustrations of Chartist politics to a direct act of violence—though unlike Walter Gerard, who kills in the heat of battle, John Barton serves his union as a terrorist and shoots his employer's son in cold blood. Having long endured the hunger and deaths of their loved ones, Barton's small son among them, the Manchester workers finally call a strike to protest yet another lowering of their wages; further goaded by the masters' intransigence and mockery, the strikers vow to avenge themselves by an act of murder, and John Barton draws the assassin's lot. Barton shoots Harry Carson without knowing that the victim has recently been flirting with the pretty Mary. Little time elapses before Carson's working-class rival for Mary's affections, Jem Wilson, is wrongly arrested for Barton's crime. Mary's immediate task is to vindicate Jem without publicly revealing that it is her own father who should be tried in his place. But this is not the only sense in which Gaskell will use her innocent heroine to cover for her hero's violence.

Indeed the very complications of the plot and the further contrivances required to untangle it are signs that the novelist shared in her heroine's anxiety for action—for “any thing, any thing, rather than leisure for reflection.” To the degree that Gaskell too loved John Barton she joined with his daughter in turning aside from the contemplation of his crime. As nearly all modern commentators note, it was John whom the novelist later insisted was the original center of her tale: “he was my hero, the person with whom all my sympathies went.”9John Barton, she told several people, was in fact to have been the book's title, “and it was a London thought coming through the publisher that it must be called Mary B.”10 But whatever the influence of Chapman and Hall, it seems clear that “the diversion to Mary Barton,” as Raymond Williams has argued, “must in fact have been welcome”11—and that London thought merely made explicit what the Manchester novelist had already done. The intensity with which Gaskell emphasized Barton's priority may have had less to do with publisher's interference than with her uneasy awareness that she had herself abandoned her intractably difficult hero.12 Having committed his terrible act, John Barton virtually disappears from the novel. In the fifteenth chapter the mill-workers strike, and in the sixteenth they draw lots for the murder; in the seventeenth the appointed assassin—“so strange, so cold, so hard” (250)—sets out grimly on his mission. In the very next chapter the lifeless body of Harry Carson is borne back to his house. We never see the murder itself nor, more significantly, do we see the murderer again until he too is almost a corpse. “No haunting ghost could have had less of the energy of life,” Jem thinks when he recognizes John Barton in the “wan, feeble figure” who has mysteriously reappeared in chapter thirty-three (412); two chapters later Barton, having confessed all, is dead. Between the victim's death and his own, the only act which Elizabeth Gaskell can imagine for her former hero is the guilty retelling of his own tale. The deeds and adventures in the intervening chapters are all Mary's.

“The energy of life” is transferred from John Barton to his daughter, but only after that energy has been decontaminated and contained. Before the heroine takes over the action of the novel, her essential innocence has been firmly secured. Mary Barton's is a more complex character than Sybil's, and in the opening chapters of the novel, the reader's anxiety about the workers' suffering is briefly compounded with fears for the heroine's virtue. Unlike Sybil, Mary does have “assignations” with her upper-class lover, encounters in the Manchester streets which she keeps a secret from her father. The first conversation of the novel introduces the ominous precedent of John Barton's pretty sister-in-law Esther, who has fled with her own lover the week before: it was Esther whose craving for fine clothes and a life of leisure initially aroused similar longings in Mary, and the heroine's ambitious daydreams of marriage to the young factory-owner are shadowed by the history of her wayward aunt. John Barton worries increasingly lest his daughter take after her absent relative; that we know of Mary's clandestine flirtation with Harry Carson, as her father does not, only heightens the sense of uneasiness that surrounds her. The return of Esther herself—now, inevitably, a prostitute—adds yet another voice to the anxious chorus. Like the reader, Esther has witnessed the heroine's secret meetings with her lover and apprehends them as signs that Mary's story threatens to repeat her own: “How can I keep her from being such a one as I am; such a wretched, loathsome creature! She was listening just as I listened, and loving just as I loved, and the end will be just like my end. How shall I save her?” (x, 170). Esther's questions seem to promise a familiar melodrama, but Gaskell swiftly and unequivocally puts an end to our suspense. In the very next chapter her childhood sweetheart, Jem Wilson, proposes. Though Mary, still dreaming of Carson, refuses emphatically, Jem is barely out the door before she realizes that his words have “unveiled her heart to her” and that she has really loved him all along. “Scarcely ten minutes” elapse before Mary's ignorance of her feelings has been wholly cleared up. The lovers will not be united until the final chapters of the novel, but the reader will never have any grounds to question the heroine's faithfulness again.

“For we have every one of us felt how a very few minutes of the months and years called life, will sometimes suffice to place all time past and future in an entirely new light,” the narrator solemnly offers in explanation; “a few moments may change our character for life” (xi, 176). The rhetoric is that of radical conversion, but the surrounding narrative insists that there has really been no change in Mary's character at all: what happens is that she now realizes the truth about herself, not that the truth itself alters. There has been no real change of heart, just an “unveiling”; the psychological model that predominates in this scene assumes a self with a fixed and stable core. “The very few minutes” of Mary Barton that would genuinely threaten “to place all time past and future in an entirely new light” are precisely those deadly minutes that Gaskell does not dramatize; it is John Barton's killing of his employer's son that is the potential act of revolution, at the very least the act that changes his own character “for life.” When Gaskell transfers such apocalyptic language from the issue of murder to that of marriage, she invokes terrifying change in a context that securely negates it: realizing that it is not Harry Carson but Jem who is her “true love,” Mary exorcises the demons of eros and ambition, and reassures us that she is the very same Mary Barton she has always been. To flirt with Harry Carson was to indulge the feminine, personal equivalent of her father's wish for social and economic transformation,13 but to love Jem is willingly to accept the familiar boundaries of her class. While Carson wooed her, “Mary dwelt upon and enjoyed the idea of becoming a lady” (vii, 121), yet no sooner does Jem propose than she realizes that “if he were poor, she loved him all the better” (xi, 177)—as though even his poverty might intensify an old friend's appeal, simply because it too is accustomed and known. “It’s no new story I’m going to speak about,” Jem says to Mary in pleading his case; “you must ha’ seen and known it long” (174). And by the time of his proposal Gaskell has made certain that it is no new story for the reader either: having concluded her very first chapter with the adolescent Jem's theft of a kiss from the thirteen-year-old Mary, she has assured that her heroine's childhood friend has long since become “our old friend” (iv, 64) as well. Indeed that Jem is virtually a member of Mary's family already—her “elder brother,” as he is elsewhere called (xiv, 208)—only emphasizes how consistently this love repudiates all change: social unrest and violence clearly pose a more immediate threat in this novel than any hint of the incestuous. Like the union of Sybil and Egremont, though at the opposite end of the social scale, Mary's marriage to Jem Wilson reaffirms the endogamy of class.

Though Gaskell's later fiction will anticipate D. H. Lawrence's in its sexual intelligence, its power to suggest how intensely desire depends upon the lovers' sense of an estranging distance between them,14 in the courtship of Mary Barton such erotic feeling is hardly at issue. It is crucial in fact that what might have looked like sexual attraction—Mary's interest in “another far handsomer than Jem” (vii, 120)—appears retrospectively to have been merely an idle interest in “ease and luxury,” readily separable from all other kinds of feeling. “What were these hollow vanities to her, now she had discovered the passionate secret of her soul?” (xi, 176-77). If it is hard to sense much passion in this passionate secret, even as it is hard to believe in a psychic revolution that merely confirms what the psyche must unconsciously have always known, that is because Mary's “love” for Jem Wilson must serve in the novel as a bulwark against passion and revolution both. When fathers are rebels, daughters must regress: the very intensity of John Barton's rage—and of Gaskell's sympathetic identification with him—makes Mary's reassuring stability necessary. What is “unveiled” in the heroine's heart paradoxically helps to veil the disturbing impulses associated with the hero.

Mary is hardly alone among novel-heroines in first refusing a proposal and then realizing her error; Pride and Prejudice, for example, is built on just such a reversal, and so too is Gaskell's own North and South. But unlike these other novels, both of which make the heroine's gradual change of feeling an extended issue of the narrative, Mary's self-discovery is absolute and instantaneous. “She had hitherto been walking in grope-light towards a precipice,” the narrator asserts: “but in the clear revelation of that past hour, she saw her danger, and turned away, resolutely and for ever” (xi, 177). To have allowed an interval of narrative time to elapse between the refusal and the heroine's realization of her love would have been to introduce an uncertainty of motive and feeling that the story of “Mary B.” cannot afford. Though Mary's subsequent discovery of the evidence that links her father to the crime makes her an accessory after the fact, the novel takes for granted that she must cover for him, and diverts any anxiety the reader might feel about her complicity into suspense as to how and when the innocent Jem will be saved. In committing his murder, John Barton steps over the metaphorical “precipice” which his daughter had narrowly avoided and thus disappears from view; for narrator and Mary alike, “the knowledge of her father's capability of guilt seemed to have opened a dark gulf in his character, into the depths of which she trembled to look” (xxxiv, 420). “I am almost frightened at my own action in writing it,” Gaskell confessed to a friend when the identity of Mary Barton's author was still largely a secret—adding later, “Remember that you are an accomplice after the fact, and bound to help in concealing it.”15

Jem's arrest for the murder allows both Mary and the narrator to seek relief in action; like Scott's Jeanie Deans and many a ballad maiden before her, the working-class girl from Manchester sets out on a perilous journey to save another's life. Traveling alone for the first time to Liverpool, persuading some rough boatmen to help her give chase to the ship that has already set sail with the vital witness, Mary proves an energetic and courageous heroine. Yet all the while Gaskell strictly prevents any of this aggressive energy from spilling over into her emotional relation with Jem. Mary has hardly uttered her refusal before she knows that she wishes to marry him, but between Jem's proposal in the eleventh chapter and his trial in the thirty-second, “maidenly modesty” compels her not to do anything to reveal the true state of her heart. The conventions of female passivity in courtship must be rigidly adhered to: Mary cannot, apparently, run after her departing lover to retract her hasty negative; cannot plan to declare her regret the next time she sees him; cannot even write a friendly letter, lest he read in it the covert signs of her love. “If you wrote at all, it would be to give him a hint you’d taken the rue, and would be very glad to have him now,” declares her confidante, the blind singer Margaret, rendering the decisive verdict on this fine point of lovers' etiquette; since “men are so queer, they like to have a’ the courting to themselves,” Mary must not risk it (xii, 189-90). The “true love” that serves to validate her is a feeling that seems to be defined by its very lack of aggression: “Maidenly modesty (and true love is ever modest),” the narrator insists, “seemed to oppose every plan she could think of, for showing Jem how much she repented her decision against him, and how dearly she had now discovered that she loved him” (xi, 177). Not until Jem is on trial for his life will the truths of the courtroom take precedence over the rituals of courtship, and Mary Barton, testifying to another's innocence, openly acknowledge the fact of her love. And it is, significantly, an almost bodiless Mary who speaks:

Many who were looking for mere flesh and blood beauty, mere colouring, were disappointed: for her face was deadly white, and almost set in its expression, while a mournful bewildered soul looked out of the depths of those soft, deep, grey eyes. But, others recognized a higher and stranger kind of beauty; one that would keep its hold on the memory for many after years.

“I was not there myself,” the next paragraph adds; “but one who was, told me that her look, and indeed her whole face, was more like the well-known engraving from Guido's picture of ‘Beatrice Cenci’ than any thing else he could give me an idea of” (xxxii, 389). It is difficult to believe that Gaskell intentionally wishes to recall that the beautiful Beatrice was herself on trial for having plotted to kill her tyrannical and incestuous father.

III. INSPIRED IGNORANCE

A need to emphasize the heroine's transcendence of “mere flesh and blood” informs the trial scene of George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical as well, and it is all the more striking as a crucial instance of what might be termed Esther Lyon's sublimation—the transforming of a “mixed susceptible nature” into something more nearly approaching a Sybilline angel (xxxvii, 468). The legal situation is both like and unlike that of Mary Barton: Felix Holt, who is on trial for manslaughter, has killed a man during an election riot—or rather, as George Eliot carefully specifies, he struggled with a constable who was about to attack him, “the constable fell” and died of a “spinal concussion” (xxxiii, 427; 432). And though the unfortunate constable mistook Felix for a leader of the riot, he had in fact been trying to restrain and divert the mob. This is a long way from John Barton's assassination of Harry Carson, or even from Walter Gerard's shooting of a trooper in defense of the People. Nonetheless, unlike Jem Wilson, Felix is not a wrongly accused man. Not only is he technically guilty of the manslaughter for which he is tried, but that technical guilt is associated with a more pervasive liability “to be carried completely out of his own mastery by indignant anger” (xxx, 390):

When once exasperated, the passionateness of his nature threw off the yoke of a long-trained consciousness in which thought and emotion had been more and more completely mingled and concentrated itself in a rage as ungovernable as that of boyhood. He was thoroughly aware of the liability, and knew that in such circumstances he could not answer for himself. … Felix had a terrible arm: he knew that he was dangerous … (391)

This account of her “dangerous” hero precedes the riot by several chapters, though George Eliot so thoroughly surrounds the actual death of the constable with extenuating circumstances that it is never wholly clear whether his fatal fall should be judged a direct consequence of Felix's “ungovernable” rage and “terrible arm.” Nor is it clear how much Felix himself is to blame for the possession of such a hazardous appendage.

But the ambiguity is sufficient so that the hero cannot fully “answer for himself”: the narrative supports Esther in her feeling that “all had not been said which might have been said on behalf of Felix” (xlvi, 570), even after he and the other defense witnesses have spoken.16 Esther spontaneously takes to the stand, and what she certifies is the innocent state of Felix's mind:

“His mind was full of great resolutions that came from his kind feeling towards others. It was the last thing he would have done to join in riot or to hurt any man, if he could have helped it. His nature is very noble; he is tender-hearted; he could never have had any intention that was not brave and good.” (573)

Like its predecessors, George Eliot's novel diverts attention from an act of violence to a virtuous mind, though in this most subtle and complex of the cases, inner purity is at once associated with the heroine and attributed by her to the hero: “he could never have had any intention that was not brave and good.”17 The reader knows that Esther is supposed to be in love with Felix, but it is not hard to understand why his rival, Harold Transome, believes that he has nothing to fear after listening to this speech. “Esther's admiration for this eccentric young man was, he thought, a moral enthusiasm …” (xlvii, 577).

The testimony of this “modest, brave, beautiful woman,” as one of the susceptible men in the audience calls her (xlvii, 576), has the appropriate effect, moving the more influential among them to arrange for Felix's pardon after he has been convicted of the crime. The narrator herself assumes a more uncertain distance from the event, simultaneously reverent and condescending. Before Esther can rise to the occasion, that once vain and frivolous young woman must be properly dissociated from her flesh: anxiously awaiting Felix's speech in his own defense, she is said to feel herself “in the grasp of that tremor which does not disable the mind, but rather gives keener consciousness of a mind having a penalty of body attached to it” (xlvi, 564). By the time she takes to the witness box, she has been “divested of all personal considerations, whether of vanity or shyness” and is all Sybil-like purity: “Her clear voice sounded as it might have done if she had been making a confession of faith” (572). Calling Esther's action “so naïve and beautiful … that it conquered every low or petty suggestion even in the commonest minds” (573), the narrator sentimentally refers to her heroine as “sweet Esther Lyon,” and uses the occasion to generalize about the special powers of a woman when she “feels purely and nobly”: “Her inspired ignorance gives a sublimity to actions so incongruously simple, that otherwise they would make men smile” (571). If we are to believe that the tensions of the trial have produced a “keener consciousness” in this heroine, we must identify that keenness with spiritual force rather than with the knowledge of anything in particular. It is not knowledge at all, but “the inspired ignorance” of an innocent, female mind. The keener consciousness of a pure woman begins to look strangely like her unconsciousness, and it is similarly effective in blotting out troublesome facts. Like Sybil when she faints in the midst of the conspirators, Esther interposes herself between the agents of the law and a man who seems to threaten revolution—and she is granted the reverence accorded one who is senseless, and a woman.

That it is the trial scene and its attendant, if submerged, anxieties that prompt this strained tribute to sublime ignorance does not seem accidental. Esther Lyon, of course, has not always been presented as a young woman of such ideal simplicity. Indeed the momentum of her story has largely depended on her character's seeming still unsettled, its moral direction in genuine doubt. Like Mary Barton, Esther begins by daydreaming of escape from her humble circumstances through “a sudden elevation in rank and fortune” (xlviii, 473), her aspirations toward elegance and refinement setting her predictably at odds with her environment. And like Gaskell's novel, Felix Holt offers its heroine an apparent opportunity to fulfill her dreams. But while Gaskell makes clear that Mary's ambitions are predicated on an illusion—Harry Carson obviously having seduction and not marriage in mind—George Eliot painstakingly designed a legal plot that would give Esther a valid claim to the Transome estate.18 Though Harold Transome's motives in wooing her are at best mixed—unless he marries her he stands to lose much of his property—his responsiveness to Esther's attractions and his marital intentions are sincere enough. Compared to Mary Barton, which seems to question its heroine's character only so that all doubts may be rapidly dispelled, Felix Holt subjects Esther to a temptation both substantial and prolonged.

George Eliot's conception of her hero does not drive her to take such swift cover in a virtuous heroine. Constable Tucker's death occurs much later in the narrative than does Harry Carson's, and the idea of the event has far less power to disturb. Apart from his liability to accidental manslaughter, the “dangerous” Felix does not pose a very serious threat to the status quo. As many commentators have noted, the meliorist doctrine Felix preaches, with its cautionary emphasis on workingmen's need for education rather than votes, scarcely constitutes a call to revolution.19 Yet if George Eliot's hero does not present nearly so difficult an imaginative problem as does Elizabeth Gaskell's, the aura of Radicalism and of latent violence with which he is still vaguely associated seems to evoke in his creator a similar impulse to evasion. George Eliot may have felt no need to follow Gaskell in renaming her novel, but it did not take critics long to note the anomaly of the title, given that Felix and his principles, as Henry James remarked in an early review, “play so brief a part and are so often absent from the scene.” “Felix Holt, in the work which bears his name, is little more than an occasional apparition,” James observed elsewhere; “and indeed the novel has no hero, but only a heroine.”20 Narratively, George Eliot copes with her Radical by turning away from his story to concentrate instead on the “inward revolution,” as she calls it, of her heroine (xlix, 591). And if Esther Lyon's psychological history seems more open to doubt and suspense than is that of Sybil or even Mary Barton, it is nonetheless still grounded in consoling images of human fixity and stasis. The “revolutionary struggle” of the heroine (591) combines the narrative pleasure of apparent change with the satisfying reassurance of the essential stability of things.

The conventional premise of such a “revolution” is not that the heroine radically changes but that she discovers who she truly is, that there already exists a virtuous self that must simply be awakened or uncovered. Esther's initial acquaintance with Felix raises “a presentiment of moral depths that were hidden from her” (xxvi, 354). “Half a year before, Esther's dread of being ridiculous spread over the surface of her life,” we are told as she delivers the crucial testimony at the trial; “but the depth below was sleeping” (xlvi, 573). As in Mary Barton, the heroine's relation with her humble lover precedes her flirtation with his upper-class rival; both in terms of class and of narrative sequence, therefore, her eventual marriage marks not a departure but a return.21 “You are just the same,” Esther says with relief when she visits Felix in prison (xlv, 557). And when, in the final chapter of the novel, the lovers are at last united, Esther's talk is all of giving up and coming back, as she cheerfully celebrates the resistance of things to any significant change. “But you?” Felix asks, “how is it all?”

“Oh, it is,” said Esther, smiling brightly as she moved towards the wicker chair, and seated herself again, “that everything is as usual: my father is gone to see the sick; Lyddy is gone in deep despondency to buy the grocery; and I am sitting here, with some vanity in me, needing to be scolded.”


“You have given it all up?” said Felix, leaning forward a little, and speaking in a still lower tone.


Esther did not speak. They heard the kettle singing and the clock loudly ticking. There was no knowing how it was: Esther's work fell, their eyes met; and the next instant their arms were round each other's necks, and once more they kissed each other. (li, 600; 601)

That “once more” looks back to their only previous embrace in the novel, when Felix called to Esther in prison, and she “went towards him with the swift movement of a frightened child toward its protector” (xlv, 558). Their arms clasped about each other's necks, the lovers are now reunited on a basis perhaps more equal but scarcely more erotic than in that earlier, regressive gesture. As when Sybil mysteriously found herself in Egremont's arms, “there was no knowing how it was.”

The first time that Felix compliments Esther, saying quietly, “You are very beautiful,” he delivers the speech while “looking up at her quite calmly, very much as a reverential Protestant might look at a picture of the Virgin, with a devoutness suggested by the type rather than by the image” (xxvii, 364). Felix's remote worship lacks even that personal vitality which for a Catholic would make the Virgin an “image” rather than a “type.” George Eliot is certainly capable of subjecting such willful idealizing to ironic scrutiny, but at critical moments in this novel, her own rhetoric seems more likely to succumb to a similar need. In their prison interview, the lovers are said to look “straight into each other's eyes, as angels do when they tell some truth” (xlv, 556). David R. Carroll has astutely observed that “George Eliot's use of religious imagery is one of the most striking and pervasive features of Felix Holt,22 and one function of this persistent spiritualizing may be to deny those dangerous passions which “Radicalism” at its most disturbing can represent. The ambiguity of Felix's violent anger is canceled by his angelic glance, which places both him and Esther at the furthest remove from “the mass of wild chaotic desires and impulses” in the riot, the “savage roar” and “blind outrages” of its crowd (xxxiii, 427; 423; 425).

This impulse toward a religious absolute, the wish to deny the very fact of change itself, is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the equivocating turn of a passage which meditates on Esther's choice of a mate—the narrator first judging as a youthful illusion what she then ringingly endorses:

And, like all youthful creatures, she felt as if the present conditions of choice were final. It belonged to the freshness of her heart that, having had her emotions strongly stirred by real objects, she never speculated on possible relations yet to come. It seemed to her that she stood at the first and last parting of the ways. And, in one sense, she was under no illusion. It is only in that freshness of our time that the choice is possible which gives unity to life, and makes the memory a temple where all relics and all votive offerings, all worship and all grateful joy, are an unbroken history sanctified by one religion. (xliv, 551)

The passage begins by realistically declaring Esther “neither … saint nor … angel,” merely a young girl with a future open to “possible relations yet to come,” only to conclude with an “unbroken” and “sanctified” history, the design of a life made cohesive and whole by a single and irrevocable choice. Insisting that the courtship fiction is no fiction, the passage makes explicit the teleological impulse latent in so many nineteenth-century novels, with their implicit equation between the decisive choice of a mate and an ultimate “parting of the ways.” In a novel that contemplates the idea of violent change—as Felix Holt, however ambivalently, does—that plot and its consoling promise may have a particular force. “We find him a Radical,” Henry James complained of Felix Holt, “and we leave him what?—only ‘utterly married’; which is all very well in its place, but which by itself makes no conclusion.”23 It is “no conclusion,” one might suggest, in part because it is too much of one: to be “utterly” married by the fiat of narrative closure is to be wholly removed from history and change, to have already made the final and only choice of life. George Eliot's “Radical” hero belongs to her most conventional heroine.

And it is not only the future which such a heroine renders “unbroken.” In the fiction of courtship, the choice “which gives a unity to life” retrospectively confirms the coherence of past history as well. A conventional heroine loves only once, a rule whose corollary is that for her to love is to discover her “real” identity; from the perspective of that single and final choice, past alternatives prove to have been mere illusions. Other loves may have temporarily seemed possible, but only because the heroine was conventionally ignorant of her true desires. The consciousness of an innocent heroine always lags behind her feelings, which means that the crucial decision of her life can be represented not as a decision but as a discovery. The heart is already committed before it is “unveiled”—as Mary Barton's is when Jem Wilson proposes, or as Sybil's is when her blush silently confesses to her love for Egremont. It is a measure of George Eliot's greatness, and of her sensitivity to the complex balance of forces in human character, that even the most conventional of her heroines should speak of having made “a deliberate choice” to give up Transome Court (li, 602), and that she should often have seemed genuinely open to the possibility of choosing otherwise. But to the degree to which George Eliot rhetorically evokes the slumbering “depth” of Esther's nature and associates its awakening with her love for Felix, she too suggests that her heroine's history concludes less with decision than with discovery: Esther's love for Felix coincides with and is identical to the unveiling of her essential, moral self. The “myth about psychic order and structure” that Leo Bersani associates with nineteenth-century narrative generally24 gathers with an especial intensity around the fiction of the marriageable young girl. If characters like the Crawfords in Mansfield Park are “ontological floaters,” in Bersani's phrase,25 then the conventional heroine provides ontological ballast, a stabilizing presence all the more attractive in a culture confronted with rapid and threatening change.

To substitute the narrative of the conventional heroine for one of political violence is thus to engage in a double maneuver of containment—to shift from the public history of class conflict to the private story of an individual courtship, and from the representation of dangerous aggression to that of modest evasion and restraint. Female modesty serves to cover male violence in these novels, as their juxtaposed narratives both demonstrate and exploit a felt connection between aggression and sexuality. Michel Foucault has suggested that for a culture to talk insistently about sex may be a way of not addressing other, more disturbing questions; and he has suggested that this is the case even when the talk takes the form of emphasizing that sex must not be talked about26—as in the story of the modest heroine. That Sybil, Mary Barton, and Felix Holt at least partly attempt to represent violent class conflict, evoking some sympathy for the men who kill in its name, makes them relatively anomalous as Victorian novels. But by directly juxtaposing politics and courtship, they paradoxically render transparent those very strategies of covering and containing that the domestic plots of many other Victorian novels practice more covertly. Even in novels that seem to have little to say about class conflict or the threat of revolution, the courtship of the heroine may cover a political story—though both the story and the act of covering it over have themselves been concealed.

Notes

  1. George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical, ed. Peter Coveney (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), xliii, 525. The novel was first published in 1866, but Coveney's text is based on the Cabinet edition of 1878. Subsequent references are indicated by chapter and page number in the text.

  2. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), p. 54.

  3. In his seminal discussion of these texts, Raymond Williams classes them—together with Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke, Charles Dickens's Hard Times, and Gaskell's own North and South—as “industrial novels,” though there is virtually no industry as such in Felix Holt. See Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 87-109. Williams argues that Gaskell's handling of John Barton's fatal act is “a dramatization of the fear of violence which was widespread among the upper and middle classes at the time,” and that the way Kingsley and George Eliot treat their heroes' involvement in political riots reflects a similar fear (p. 90; p. 104). Compared to Barton or even Felix Holt, however, Kingsley's tailor-poet is hardly a threatening figure; when Alton Locke tries to strike a man—his wealthy cousin and rival—it is he himself who falls “bleeding to the ground.” Though there is a partial, frustrated courtship plot in Alton Locke, Kingsley's hero does not really need a conventional heroine; Alton is sufficiently “feminine” and “unmanned,” as the novel puts it, without one. See Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet (New York: J. M. Dent, 1970), xxxv, 313; and xxiv, 223, 224. Alton Locke was originally published in 1850.

  4. Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” [1908], The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (1959; rpt. London: Hogarth Press, 1973), IX: “A special application of this proposition that sexual life lays down the pattern for the exercise of other functions can easily be recognized in the female sex as a whole,” Freud writes. “Their upbringing forbids their concerning themselves intellectually with sexual problems though they nevertheless feel extremely curious about them, and frightens them by condemning such curiosity as unwomanly and a sign of a sinful disposition. In this way they are scared away from any form of thinking, and knowledge loses its value for them. The prohibition of thought extends beyond the sexual field, partly through unavoidable association, partly automatically, like the prohibition of thought about religion among men, or the prohibition of thought about loyalty among faithful subjects. … I think that the undoubted intellectual inferiority of so many women can … be traced back to the inhibition of thought necessitated by sexual suppression” (198-99).

  5. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or The Two Nations, ed. Thom Braun (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), II, v, 96. Subsequent references to this edition, which is based on that of 1845, are indicated by book, chapter, and page number in the text.

  6. See my “Podsnappery, Sexuality, and the English Novel,” Critical Inquiry, 9 (1982), 339-57, for an analysis of the innocent heroine's blushing and a brief discussion of Sybil's collapse into unconsciousness in the conspiracy scene.

  7. See Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (1963; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1968), especially pp. 125-26 and 226-28 on the inevitable death of the murderous dark hero.

  8. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), xxiv, 324. Subsequent references to this edition, printed from the first edition of 1848, are indicated by chapter and page in the text.

  9. Elizabeth Gaskell to Mrs. Greg [?early 1849], The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 74.

  10. Elizabeth Gaskell to Miss Lamont (January 5 [1849]), Letters, p. 70.

  11. Williams, Culture and Society, pp. 90-91. In his introduction to the Penguin Mary Barton, Stephen Gill makes a similar point (p. 22).

  12. In 1861, some thirteen years after its publication, Gaskell gave an inexpensive edition of the novel to a friend, taking care to note on the flyleaf: “This story was at first entitled John Barton, but at the publisher's request the name was changed to that which it at present bears.” The volume is now in the Manchester Central Library. Annette B. Hopkins has previously called attention to the inscription; see “Mary Barton: A Victorian Best-Seller,” The Trollopian, 3 (1948), 11.

  13. Rosemarie Bodenheimer has noted this and other parallels between the daughter's and the father's experience. See “Private Grief and Public Acts in Mary Barton,Dickens Studies Annual, 9 (1981), 195-216. Though this essay, which focuses on the unity of the novel's two plots, seems to me the most thorough and acute analysis of the novel in print, Bodenheimer overstates the unconventionality of Mary Barton as a “heroine of rescue” (210)—ignoring both the resemblance of Gaskell's traveling heroine to Scott's Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Mid-Lothian and the degree to which Mary's freedom of movement is a literary convention associated with her class. Even Sybil bravely sets out on a rescue mission through the slums of London.

  14. Both Martin Dodsworth in his introduction to the Penguin edition of North and South (Harmondsworth: 1970), p. 25, and Rosemarie Bodenheimer in “North and South: A Permanent State of Change,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 34 (1979), 296, briefly suggest the comparison with Lawrence.

  15. Elizabeth Gaskell to Mary Ewart [?late 1848], Letters, pp. 67-68.

  16. Felix's speech in his own defense is equivocal, stressing all the reasons for judging him “Not guilty,” and then, like the narrative as a whole, suggesting that in some other circumstances his political rage might in fact lead him to just such a crime: “I’m not prepared to say I never would assault a constable when I had more chance of deliberation. I certainly should assault him if I saw him doing anything that made my blood boil. … I hold it blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning” (xlvi, 565).

  17. Arnold Kettle, who briefly compares the “conventional melodrama” of this trial scene to the one in Mary Barton, complains that here, “as throughout almost all the latter part of the novel, the actual implications of Felix's Radicalism are lost sight of. It is to his ‘nobility’ that Esther testifies at his trial, not his principles: what she gives him is a high-grade character-reference.” See “‘Felix Holt the Radical,’” in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 108.

  18. Peter Coveney provides a useful summary of this convoluted plot, and of George Eliot's frequent consultations with Frederic Harrison on its legal accuracy, in his “Note on the Law of Entail in the Plot of ‘Felix Holt,’” appended to his Penguin edition of the novel, pp. 629-37.

  19. Thomas Pinney cites the observation of Joseph Jacobs in his Literary Studies (London: 1895), p. xxi: “Felix Holt the Radical is rather Felix Holt the Conservative; he is not even a Tory-Democrat.” See “The Authority of the Past in George Eliot's Novels,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 21 (1966), 133. W. F. T. Myers concludes that “Nothing is clearer than that politically he is no Radical at all,” in “Politics and Personality in Felix Holt,Renaissance and Modern Studies, 10 (1966), 20.

  20. [Henry James], “Felix Holt, the Radical,” Nation, 3 (1866), 127; and [Henry James], “The Novels of George Eliot,” Atlantic Monthly, 18 (1866), 485. In an unsigned review in The Times, E. S. Dallas suggested that a male novelist would have named this book after its heroine since, “In point of fact it is her story that the novel is chiefly engaged with, and Felix Holt is less interesting in himself than as being interesting to her” (26 June 1866), p. 6.

  21. On her Bycliffe side at least, Esther is not working-class; since she has been raised by Mr. Lyon from a small baby, we are presumably meant to take her ladylike airs as hereditary. Nonetheless, the novel ends by minimizing any class differences between the lovers. Esther feels that a future as an heiress would be incongruous with “that past which had created the sanctities and affections of her life” (xxxviii, 476), and the chapter in which she resigns her claim to the Transome estate concludes simply, “She wished to go back to her father” (1, 599). In Felix, the educated son of a weaver turned quack doctor, Esther recognizes that useful topos—a “cultured nature” (xliii, 523).

  22. David R. Carroll, “Felix Holt: Society as Protagonist,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 17 (1962), 243.

  23. [James], “Felix Holt,” 127. It is of course the conclusion of the English novel before James. See Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 213-28.

  24. Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 61.

  25. Bersani, p. 76. Of the Crawfords, Bersani writes: “The great threat to Mansfield Park—and to the cultural values it represents—is precisely an improvised self, or the possibility that there is no ‘best self’ to which one ‘must be true.’”

  26. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, an Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980).

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