By Poorva Rajaram
Do good head and George Eliot go together?
Yes.
George Eliot’s anti-heroines are not flawed in an easily comprehensible way. Eliot is certainly not one of those authors who makes a dent in their characters so ‘normal people’ can relate to them. Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda (I will conveniently forget about the other books) contain two of the most contorted female protagonists.
Dorethea Casuabon from Middlemarch has a strange orgasmic relationship with religion and men who think high thoughts and this leads her to a disastrous marriage. Gwendolen Harleth from Daniel Deronda manages, rather improbably, to find her bad marriage through enlarged self-regard.
“Words could hardly be too wide or vague to indicate the prospect that made a hazy largeness about poor Gwendolen on the heights of her young self-exultation. Other people allowed themselves to be made slaves of, and to have their lives blown hither and thither like empty ships in which no will was present: it was not to be so with her, she would no longer be sacrificed to creatures worth less than herself, but would make the very best of the chances life offered her”.
So when shit hits the fan and continues to do so until Gwendolen trusts “neither herself nor her future”, her self-exaltation is clearly to blame.
“The brilliant position she had longed for, the imagined freedom she would create for herself in marriage, the deliverance from the dull insignificance of her girlhood — all were immediately before her; and yet they had come to her hunger like food with the taint of sacrilege upon it, which she must snatch with terror. In the darkness and loneliness of her little bed, her more resistant self could not act against the first onslaught of dread after her irrevocable decision”.
Eliot is not cutting about her characters in a touchy-feely we-are-just-a-bunch-of-misfits way. An almost overpowering empiricism seems to drive her detailing of Gwendolen’s shortcomings — from her ego to her dependence on men. Yet, it is not satire or parody or anything remotely resembling a cheapshot. Many of Daniel Deronda’s 800 pages clearly outline why Gwendolyn is a glaringly inadequate person and why the scope of her growth will never exceed self-delusion.
Middlemarch is a slightly more hopeful novel. The inexorability of self-deluded people only simmers through this book instead of lighting it on fire. It has near perfect length, pacing and structure. The premise is quite simple: Eliot topographically tracks and zooms her way around the village and uses a set of couples as her lab rats. What follows are the most cut-down to size characters I have ever met in a book. Not only are their current mindscapes up for scrutiny, but every change in their lives (even ones they don’t know about) is tracked meticulously.
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life was published in 1874 and now holds an all too cute, ‘quintessential village novel’ place in literary history. If the novel has indeed moved out of the village into the city, Middlemarch offers a template for the perfect city novel. The actual city might as well recede into the background. All effort must be directed at drilling into characters heads. If people are captured at the centre of their shimmering interpersonal net, the city will have no choice but to come alive. Of course, the other George Eliot trick is to include a woman who has fits of sexual ecstasy when she catches a glimpse of an unreadably dry manuscript — a woman who is turned on by Good Heads.
What kind of flirting would George Eliot approve of?
Not the kind where you sell out women.
Gwendolen’s unhealthy relationship with masculinity comes up early in the book. She wants to be a man — she even manages to romanticise it. Lest this be read as proto-queer energy working its way up in the novel, Gwendolen has no interest in the aesthetics of being a man. She just imagines (not without reason) that she would have more access to the world if she were male. And she uses this particular grouse to flirt with the man who will eventually torment her.
“We women can’t go in search of adventures–to find out the North-West passage or the course of the Nile, or to hunt tigers in the East. We must stay where we grow, or where the gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers, to look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining. That is my notion about the plants: they are often bored , and that is the reason why some of them have got poisonous. What do you think” Gwendolen had run on rather nervously, lightly whipping the rhododendron bush in front of her.”
There is an early cautionary feminist tale somewhere here. If you sell out your own sex to flirt with a man, you will get married to an evil rich man and go through the humiliation of learning that everyone who said “I told you so” really did tell you so. (Incidentally, that more of less covers Daniel Deronda). When Gwendolen develops feelings for the pious Daniel Deronda out of wedlock, she uses the oncoming awareness of her own flaws to flirt with him.
“‘I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could any one find an intense interest in life? And many do.’ said Deronda ‘Ah I see! The fault I find in the world is my own fault’ said Gwendolen, smiling at him.”
and
“‘I wonder whether I understand that’. said Gwendolen, putting up her chin in her old saucy manner. ‘I believe I am not very affectionate; I believe I am not very affectionate, perhaps you mean to tell me, that is the reason why I don’t see much good in life.’”
This is probably not a surprise, but her flirting wasn’t very successful.
George Eliot has exploded my empathetic reading universe. Reading her is not about ‘meeting tortured souls like me’. I’ve come to the scary conclusion that reading George Eliot is about meeting the victims of cruel literary takedowns.
Eliot clearly draws the boundaries her characters will never transcend. This has not bridged the gap between people and Eliot-book-people. The truth is more disconcerting. Her book-people are realer and more mistake-prone than me and my friends. In fact, one of the side-effects of reading Eliot will be turning to the next person you meet, greeting them with a cold flash of inspiration and deciding they are terminally prone to self-misjudgement.
Through her laser-like etching of people, George Eliot has even stolen the one sureshot thing her readership has: human error. I, the poor reader, can’t even be inadequate as well as her characters. I have 2D flaws while they have 3D ones. Bastards.
What would George Eliot do with reticence?
She would judge it.
Eliot’s characters are forced to have an explicable, shape-shifting internal life for her to run a narratorial magnifying glass over. Perhaps, this came from her love of philosophy. Characters can be airbrushed by kinder authors who save them from analysis. Gwendolen Harleth wasn’t so lucky.
“Gwendolen would not have liked to be an object of disgust to this husband whom she hate: she liked all the disgust to be on her side.”
I am jealous of George Eliot’s characters. In the muddle of my own head, I want someone to note from afar all that is and all that is changing. In a move that will get rid of therapy altogether, I propose that someone invent a George Eliot Android app. It will listen in on your life and deliver its scathing verdict over hundreds of pages. Then, the battle for dispassionate self-mapping will be forever won.