The Construction and Deconstruction of Science in Middlemarch
Though this essay's title may at first the strike reader as an anachronistic
conceit of contemporary theory, as Michael York Mason has observed,
"Constructions,' theory,' acquired knowledge,' demonstration,' evidence,'
perception of facts,' probabilities,'--this is part of the language of the
moral life in Middlemarch" (Mason, 166). Indeed, the scientific language of
Middlemarch, its construction in relation to scientific theory, the science of
its form as well as its content, have been observed by a growing body of
criticism.{1} As J. Hillis Miller observes, the subtitle of the novel itself, A
Study of Provincial Life, alludes strongly to "scientific study" (66). The
very first lines of the novel are limned with scientific rhetoric, which serve
to frame it within a specific, historical and discursive referencing. This
discursive referencing is maintained throughout. The predominance of
attention given to Lydgate, the importance of optic metaphor, and the
obvious evidence' of Darwinistic and other evolutionary theory having
made their mark on Eliot, are but a few of the suggestions in Middlemarch
signaling the importance of science in its making, both within and around
the novel.
For the contemporary reader of Middlemarch, the conspicuousness of
this scientific language has been greatly vitiated by such language's
permeation into modern social discourse (Beer, 149). Likewise, its marks
were more greatly sensed by Eliot's contemporaries. Eliot's introduction of
scientific allusion jolted her first critics, and she may be regarded as a
forerunner in incorporating what was then specialized scientific language
into fictional (and other cultural) usage.
As Nancy L. Paxton has commented in George Eliot and Herbert Spencer:
Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender, much
contemporary discussion of George Eliot in relation to science has been in
fact largely a study of her influences (Paxton, 3-4). This criticism has
effectively colonized a consideration of Eliot's writing in relation to science,
using it as a kind of linchpin on which to hang the controversies of her
day.{2} Though these critics do well to elucidate the scientific underpinnings
of Eliot's thought, they tend to view her work as syncretic rather than
seeing her as a theorist in her own right. Even George Levine, who is
generally more appreciative of Eliot's own scientific understanding, states
in reference to her grasp of determinism, "that at best she was an amateur
philosopher" (268).
Paxton's own work rescues Eliot in terms of her challenges to Spencer
and Darwin in the course of her novels and other works. This Paxton does
with specific reference to their implications and assertions regarding sex
and gender (passim). At the very least, these challenges, discussed briefly
below, mark a metonymic reinsertion of Eliot into the crux of scientific
discourse, positioning her as a hopeful Lydgate, resisting her relegation to
the status of an interloping Mrs. Cadwallader. At the most, they suggest
that Eliot's challenges to science were far-reaching. Yet Eliot works within
scientific theory, using many of its own assumptions as tools to interrogate
it.
The fictionalizing' of science happens to be a meta-theme in
Middlemarch, and one which, I will argue, Eliot sets out consciously and
masterfully to interrogate. In the process, I hope to show that Eliot's use of
science is far from naive or merely syncretizing.{3} To the contrary, I will
venture to argue that in Middlemarch Eliot actually anticipates a greater
discursive shift in scientific theory of which Thomas Kuhn's The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions (l962) is the watermark in science itself, and
which Michel Foucault marks and notes in his various archaeologies of
knowledge.{4} She does so only to the extent possible within later
nineteenth-century thought, but in writing the first novel to appropriate
and interrogate scientific discourse "as an explicit theme" (Shuttleworth,
143),{5} she assumes a distinctively advantageous historical and critical
position. Undertaking a peculiar investigation of science within fiction, Eliot
destablizes both, blurring the border between them. By placing the events
of Middlemarch some forty years earlier than the time of narration, the
historical and subjective contingency of science is exposed. Cures' once
taken for granted already appear ludicrous in light of Lydgate's methods,
and the doubt cast on Middlemarch's medical establishment is heightened
by the narrative interval, during which further changes are assumed to
have taken place. The same scrutiny is levied against scientific theory. The
effect is an implicit questioning of the authority that science holds in the
time of Eliot's contemporaries, as well as in that of Middlemarch's
subsequent readers.
On the other hand, the serious consideration given in a cultural medium
to science extends the reach and currency of its theories. The novel lends
itself to a wider dissemination of ideas than that available to pure'
scientific texts. Eliot probably exposed to evolutionary and other
materialistic theory some unwary readers who might not have seen it
elsewhere. That she did not hold to a strict Spencerian or Darwinian model,
especially as applied to the social, may have mattered less to many readers
than the very fact that she negotiated with determinism and evolutionism
at all. Such ideas were quite unsettling to many Victorians, and Eliot was
far more comfortable with them than most of her contemporaries. As K.M.
Newton remarks, "George Eliot's attitude to Darwinism is of especial
interest because she tried to oppose some of its dangerous consequences
from an interesting standpoint while accepting the theory itself as valid"
(Newton, 278-9). Whether she actually "accepted" or worked within the
theory as a culturally-contingent medium, is a question I will explore.
The construction and deconstruction' of science in Middlemarch comes
by way of imagery, allusion, metaphor, analogy and parable in her
passages, the relations of which to science are sometimes best illustrated
when compared to the work and thought of pure' scientists, if such a
category exists in the nineteenth-century. Of course, George Eliot has her
debts--like any other man of science,' she stands (sometimes precariously)
on the shoulders of others: Bichat (Lydgate's mentor), Lyley, Claude
Bernard, T.H. Huxley, John Stuart Mill, Comte, Whewell, Herbert Spencer,
and of course, G.H. Lewes. She drew from all of them, most especially
Herbert and Lewes. She did, however, like all of them, go beyond mere
appropriation. Her effort has its own merit in relation to the corpus of
science.
Middlemarch initially appears to reveal a bias towards what Michael
Mason has identified as the Whewellian view of scientific theory (159).
According to Whewell, scientific laws were concepts superinduced' onto
the facts.' In The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences , Whewell asserted
that these originary concepts were a priori, natural tendencies in the mind.
John Stuart Mill opposed Whewell's inductive' theory with a strict
empiricism.
For empiricists, scientific theory is derived from strict observation, and
law is only found through the discovery of repetitive natural phenomena.
For Whewellians, on the other hand, experience (or observation) has no
meaning without guiding, innate ideas which organ-ize and make them
accessible, and in effect, sensible' (Mason, 158-69). Empiricism in science
is homologous to the naive realism' in fiction that may be thought to
characterize Eliot's earlier work, such as Adam Bede and Mill on the Floss.
Later, Eliot tends towards Whewellian theory, although, as I will discuss
below, she eventually collapses the two perspectives into one another. Her
collapsing of this dichotomy has epistemological and cultural implications,
as well as structural ones for the novel itself, as the experiment struggles
with its own containment.
Middlemarch begins by establishing itself within the superinduced,'
experimental framework of science: "Who that cares much to know the
history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under varying
experiments in Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint
Theresa...?" (Prelude, 1).{6} Not only is science invoked, but a particular
kind of science is indicated. It is historical and experimental. To the
scientific mixture' is already added an anachronism in the figure of Saint
Theresa. Saint Theresa is superinduced' onto an otherwise strictly contemporary,
scientific jargon. The willfulness involved in the juxtaposition suggests that
the work will be more than mere observation, but rather an experiment'
conducted by the narrator.{7} We have from the outset a peculiar blend of
science and history.
As Sally Shuttleworth implies, the strict techniques of realistic
observation--homologous to natural history and empiricism-- in Eliot's
early works, in Middlemarch are complicated with what H.G. Lewes, a
scientist and close associate of George Eliot's, called "Ideal Construction."
Lewes believed that science moved ahead by imaginative leaps rather than
by empirical plodding alone (143-49). He considered imagination the most
important requirement for any scientific discovery.
Middlemarch does not abandon observation for experiment, but rather
involves experiment in order to discover the underlying principles which
animate phenomena. In order for connections to be made, the imagination
must be involved. From Middlemarch and other of Eliot's writing, as
compared to those of scientific theorists, we can see this distinction
illustrated. After beginning to read Darwin's The Origin of the Species,
George Eliot writes to her friend and feminist activist, Barbara Bodichon:
We have just been reading Darwin's book on the Origin of Species' just now: it
makes an epoch, as the expression of his thorough adhesion, after long years of
study, to the Doctrine of Development--and not the adhesion of an anonym like
the author of the Vestiges', but of a long-celebrated naturalist. The book is
ill-written and sadly wanting in illustrative facts--of which he has collected a
vast number, but reserves them for a future book...So the world gets on step by
step towards clearness and honesty! But to me the Development theory and all
other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble
impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes (Letters,
qtd. in Newton, 278).
This passage at once confirms the relative value of observation for Eliot, of
"illustrative facts," while simultaneously criticizing the "adhesion" to
"explanations of processes" of a "long-celebrated naturalist" who misses
"the mystery" "underlying the processes."
Eliot elaborates this view in Middlemarch passages, the most
impressive of which is the description of Lydgate's developing theory:
Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their
profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:--...But these kinds of
inspiration Lydgate regarded as vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination
that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in
that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward
light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the
ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. (ch. 16, 147).
Here the scientist probes the mystery underlying the processes, and the
methodology involves an imagination which connects phenomena which
are inaccessible to observation alone, and at best, merely inferred by the
senses. Consonant with Whewellian scientific theory, the discovery of
"ethereal atoms" is the provenance of the imagination in the construction
of "ideally illuminated space." "Cheap narration," plain empiricism (or bad
realistic fiction), is "vulgar" and limited in scope by comparison. As
Foucault articulates in terms strikingly relevant to the passage at hand:
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, doctors described what for centuries
had remained below the threshold of the visible and the expressible, but this
did not mean that, after over-indulging in speculation, they had begun to
perceive once again, or that they listened to reason rather than to imagination;
it meant that the relation of between the visible and invisible--which is
necessary to all concrete knowledge--changed its structure, revealing through
gaze and language what had previously been below and beyond their domain (xii,
emphasis mine). The imagery recalls a passage of John Tyndall's important enough
to G.H. Lewes for the latter to quote it in his Problems of Life and Mind:
Knowledge once gained casts a light beyond its own immediate boundaries. There
is no discovery so limited as not to illuminate something beyond itself. The
force of intellectual penetration into this penumbral region which surrounds
outward knowledge is not, as some seem to think, dependent upon method, but upon
the genius of the investigator (Tyndell, qtd. by Lewes in Foundations of a
Creed, I, 32).{8}
In the terms established by the narrator of Middlemarch, scientific
theory and image always contain the seeds of their own undoing. Another
view lies "beyond" or "below," as the association of these passages suggests.
Empiricism is limited by its transience. Likewise, we may expect the
scientific images presented to infer a continuum of sub-version or metaversion, as the image of the variable lens of the microscope illustrates:
Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making
interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak
lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which
other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated taxpennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make
vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of
custom. (ch. 6, 50).
This passage suggests an endless possibility of revision, which is, of course,
analogous to science's own history. Furthermore, not only are
interpretations tentative, but they involve an active projection on the part
of the viewing subject, as seeming to "see an active voracity," "so many
animated tax-pennies," and "victims," are finally metaphorical descriptions
dependent upon the subject's "interpretations."
In Middlemarch passages regarding science, there is almost always a
connection or correlation drawn between science and narration or fiction.
Science is invoked to discuss the unfolding of character and plot, and vice
versa. The microscope image above, for example, is drawn to illustrate Mrs.
Cadwallader's matchmaking, "producing what may be called thought and
speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed" (ch. 6, 50). The
connection of language to the material of science is telling here, because in
Middlemarch, science finally depends on metaphor. As J. Hillis Miller notes
in this context, "if for Eliot all seeing is falsified by the limitations of
point of view, it is an even more inevitable law, for her, that we make things
what they are by naming them" (79). Likewise, Eliot is able to establish a
connection between science and fiction in the form of language, and fiction
and science make their way into one another.
In the above passage about Lydgate's scientific theory, a connection is
putatively drawn between science and fiction by way of the inapposite
appearance of the word "narration," in connection with the "long pathways
of necessary sequence." Fiction (narration and necessary sequence) is held
intact, it is implied, by the same experimental and imaginative sequences
as scientific discovery. The image of "outer darkness through long
pathways," also reverberates with the "labyrinth of petty courses" (3, 22)
through which Dorothea must travel (as well as with the other, numerous
references to the labyrinth in Middlemarch). Guided also by a "light," "[h]er
flame," which, "fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction,"
(Prelude, 1), Dorothea's project is similar to Lydgate's. As a "later-born"
Theresa, living on the crest of nineteenth-century materialist science and
philosophy, she is "helped by no coherent social faith and order which
could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul"
(Prelude, 1). The novel is an experiment' in providing for this lack by
means of science and philosophy which substitute for "faith and order."
As remarked by Ronald Schleifer in Rhetoric and Death: The Language
of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory, it is "[t]he very success of
positive science in the nineteenth century [which] conditioned this failure"
or "breakdown of what Steiner perceives as the centrality' of our Western
inheritance' which provided touchstones of order and of that unbroken
continuum'" (Schleifer,10; Steiner qtd. in Schleifer, 10). Likewise, the novel
is "an experiment in time" in terms of its own historical moment, as well as
intrinsically, as narration. It is also an experiment for its protagonists, who
must, like the narrator, seek unifying principles--a scientific' search, made
necessary, in part, by science itself, or by the conditions which permitted
science its expansion into matters human. This paradoxical realization in
Middlemarch accounts, in part, for its ambiguous treatment of science.
Science is both problem and tool, as an early exchange, during which
Chettam hopes to impress Dorothea but is interrupted, suggests:
"I am reading the Agricultural Chemistry," said this excellent baronet
[Chettam], "because I am going to take one of the farms into my own hands, and
see if something cannot be done in setting a good pattern of farming among my
tenants. Do you approve of that, Miss Brooke?"
"A great mistake, Chettam," interposed Mr. Brooke, "going into electrifying
your land and that sort of thing, and making a parlor of your cow-house. It
won't do. I went into science a great deal myself at one time; but I saw it
would not do. It leads to everything; you can let nothing alone" (ch. 2, 12).
Mr. Brooke is as shallow and frivolous a character as Middlemarch
presents, yet his statement is largely borne out in the novel. In science as
well as other scholarship, leading to everything,' is often the equivalent to
leading nowhere. As Dorothea senses regarding the "Key to all Mythologies"
during her honeymoon, "the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had
dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms
and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither" (ch. 20, 176).
Casaubon "can let nothing alone" in his search for a generalizing theory of
mythology, and thus his mind is described as a "labyrinthine"
cul de sac. Dorothea's desire to "learn everything" (ch. 3, 23) leads her to
the "ungauged reservoir" of Casaubon's mind where she sees "reflected
there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought"
(ch. 3, 18). With these characters, Eliot subtly undermines any totalizing
view offered by generalizing theories, whether of life, culture, or science.
Lydgate's future is subtly presaged in the continuation of the above
description of his scientific quest in search of the "Primitive Tissue":
He for his part had tossed away all cheap inventions where ignorance finds
itself able and at ease: he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the
very eyes of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to
more and more exact relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute
processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares
which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate
poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy
consciousness. (ch. 16, 147).
While Rosamond is generally thought of as having been the impediment
to Lydgate's research, she may have actually provided the laboratory. It is,
after all, through his marriage to Rosamond that Lydgate finds "the first
lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime." Middlemarch itself may in a
sense be his Primitive Tissue' that "counted on swallowing Lydgate and
assimilating him very comfortably" (ch. 15, 137). It did just this, proffering
its finest allurements. As Nancy Paxton observes:
Lydgate's determination to take a more strictly scientific view of woman' after
his disastrous affair with Madame Laure becomes doubly ironic when we recognize
not only that Lydgate succumbs, in spite of himself, to Rosamond's similarly
superficial charms, but also that he marries a woman, who, according to the most
advanced scientific principles of evolutionary theory in the 1870s, is the
perfect mate. (176).
Paxton's argument--that Eliot's use of Rosamond to baffle a progressive
scientist such as Lydgate is intended to undercut Herbert Spencer's
evolutionary theory of sex selection--is clearly demonstrable (171-97).
Rosamond (unlike George Eliot herself{9}) meets all of Spencer's evolutionary
criteria for natural selection' as a wife. Yet she fails posterity (her egoism
in "personal beauty" causing her to lose a child). (According to Spencer, the
beauty of women was their primary worth with respect to the future of
the species--see note 9). Rosamond was also, to Lydgate's early
satisfaction, "instructed to the true womanly limit and not one hair's
breadth beyond," which met Spencer's requisite qualifications as well.
Having read and personally argued with Herbert's conclusions, Eliot
obviously set out consciously to refute them in Middlemarch. The
miserable marriage of Lydgate and Rosamond brings forth no issue in
terms of children, science, or the general welfare of the two. The marriage
serves to undermine the altruism that Spencer ascribed to women and
marriage.
By Lydgate's failure in perception, science itself, at least incidentally,
may be implicated. The theory of evolution doesn't hold in his social case.
The metaphor is subverted by its failure in application. It is significant
that Eliot uses a scientist with which to test Herbert's theory of sex
selection. Not only is a theory provisionally framed' and debunked, but a
scientist is also frustrated. This sacrifice of a scientist to the ramifications
of a scientific theory, "presents," as Paxton argues, "a cautionary tale about
the revenge that history takes on pioneers of science like Lydgate or--for
that matter--like Herbert Spencer himself" (174). Of all the characters,
Lydgate is the one who should be expected to see "below and beyond" the
"feeble impression" of a Rosamond, to discover "what lies under the
processes." He lacks the very vision he espouses and may stand for the
provisionally framed' and historically contingent scientific fiction.'
Yet these samples may not necessarily serve as metonymic
representatives for the whole vision of science in the novel. Rather, it may
be that they are specious samples of subjective "selection" offered to the
voracious appetite of scientific evolution, rendered unfit by their lack of
"adaptation" to the cultural environment.
One of Eliot's most celebrated passages, which begins with a reference
to Spencer himself,{10} complicates the question of subjectivity and science
in an apparent overriding of our earlier observations. Its centrality to this
discussion merits extended quotation:
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly
furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has show me this
pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel
made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched
in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a center of
illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine
series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the
scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which
produces the flattering illusion of concentric arrangement, its light falling
with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches
are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent--of Miss
Vincy, for example. Rosamond had a Providence of her own who had kindly made her
more charming than other girls, and who seemed to have arranged Fred's illness
and Mr. Wrench's mistake in order to bring her and Lydgate within effective
proximity (ch. 27, 237-8, emphasis mine).
This passage is indeed, as J. Hillis Miller has observed, "more complicated
than it at first appears" (76), and I should like to take it a bit further than
I believe he has. Without, for the moment, commenting on the initial tone
and language, I will go directly to the central image of the candle and the
lamp. The first order of the signified appears to be egoism and subjectivity;
the "arrangement" of "events" according to one's own "flattering" design.
The world appears to conform to the wishes of the egoist by the projection
of the same from the subjective light. The image is applied most directly to
Rosamond, "for example," though it does not exclude others, such as
Bulstrode, who obviously had a Providence of his own.'
This perspective of the subject can hardly be a scientific vantage point,
since "[i]t is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere
impartially." Rather, it would appear that science or the "objective"
observer is given a transcendent power of vision which disqualifies, in
some sense, that of the relative subject. If there is any critique of science
going on at all, Eliot would seem to inveigh against the "Ideal Construction"
theory in favor of an extended empiricism: with further observation "[i]t is
demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially." Yet
such a demonstration is only possible by removing the observer (the
candle or light)-- "The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of
any person now absent" (my emphasis). But the question then becomes-when the lamp is removed, who is left there to witness the "events?"
In this case it is inferred that someone is present for the impartial
view; "an eminent philosopher," the narrator, the scientist. The question
here is a central one for the novel and for its view of science. Throughout
the novel, there has been every suggestion of the possibility of an overarching scientific view, of an omniscient philosophic narrator. "A systole
and diastole in all inquiry" has aimed at "continually expanding and
shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an objectglass" (ch. 63, 576); from wide-angle, to telescopic, to microscopic, to that
view "inaccessible by a any sort of lens." As J. Hillis Miller has brilliantly
argued, however, in this particular sample, "[t]his objective vision, such is
the logic of Eliot's parable, shows that what is really there' has no order
whatsoever, but is merely random scratches without pattern or meaning"
(77).
The problem with this reading, Miller argues, is that it is at odds with
the other prevalent, structuring metaphors in the novel--the web, the
channel, the labyrinth, the optics--which aim at metaphoric organization
of experience by the narrator. These metaphors offer means of ordering
experience (67-81). The question then becomes whether "an implication...
has by accident, as it were, slipped in along with implications which are
intended'" (78),--chaos has invaded the novel--or whether Eliot has
constructed' this very deconstruction intentionally.' By constructed the
deconstruction,' I mean that she has built up a metaphor designed to fall
apart, with the aim of demonstrating its instability and therefore the
instability of what it might represent.
What should be pointed out here is that which has been quite
overlooked in this line of inquiry. The very first image is that of placing an
object of inquiry ("your ugly furniture") "into the serene light of science."
The parable is circular and self-referential, implicating its own "serene
light" in the lesson it gives. Yet, in hastening the reader towards its
illustration, it manages to slip' the candle in below the "serene light of
science" making the candle that "which produces the flattering illusion."
The philosopher's "pregnant" fact gives birth. It reproduces its own truth'
in the form of the candle's projection, thereby having its own projection
escape notice. The light of science "produces the flattering illusion" of
objectivity that orders the parable, just as the candle orders the scratches.
The resonance of these images is unavoidable once noticed, and "the
serene light of science" becomes implicated in the "light falling with an
exclusive optical selection." If light produces a flattering effect inside the
parable, it must also do so from the outset, from the light that illuminates
the lesson itself, "the serene light of science." The word parable means to
set aside or along side. As I read it, in the reproduction of "serene light" in
the form of the candle, science is set aside, pretending to disengage itself
from its own viewing subject. Thus the passage becomes a parable about
science itself as it attempts to construct its objectivity by means of eliding
its own subjective participation in observation. It also a passage about the
objective realist narrator,' which Eliot has by this time long rejected.
The novel is too skeptical of absolute points of view to allow this kind
of image without subverting it in the process. Numerous suggestions
throughout the novel of alternate points of view support this skepticism.
Even the over-arching view of narration, which would propose to collect
and balance subjective interpretations, is undermined by the narrator's
own statement: "all the light I can command must be concentrated on this
particular web" (ch. 15, 126, emphasis mine). "The lights and shadows
must always fall with a certain difference" (ch. 10). Thus, the narrator,
homologous to the model of objective scientist prevalent in the nineteenthcentury, would appear to be creating the same kinds of patterns as the
candle on the lamp. The narration, which, like scientific observation, only
presents "the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an
even web" (Finale, 746). The use of the word, "selection" as a direct result
of the candle's action, as an obvious reference to evolutionary theory,
further implicates science in this subjectivity.
This interpretation is further supported by the fact the above passage
echoes strongly a similar, earlier passage of Spencer's in The Principles of
Psychology (1871) in which he describes the failure of "class reasoning."
According to Spencer, "the very act of predication' brings into prominence
those members of the class which fulfill the predication' and leaves in the
background those members of the class which do not fulfill it,' just as a
candle before a mirror creates the illusion of arcs of circles having the
light as its center'" (Spencer, Psychology, qtd. in Paxton). Eliot's passage
mirrors' Spencer's, and as Paxton observes, "raises much larger questions
about contemporary scientific methods as well" (174). "Class reasoning" is
what Spencer's theory of sex selection itself is guilty of. In this way, the
scientist's own imagery and methodology is applied to the scientist himself.
Like Bultrode's, the scientist's subjectivity contaminates' his view
as obstinately as when we look through the window from a lighted room, the
objects we turn our backs on are still before us, instead of the grass and
trees. The successive events inward and outward were there in one view: though
each might be dwelt on in turn, the rest still kept their hold in the
consciousness (Ch. 61, 554-5, emphasis mine).
Eliot's notion of subjectivity is not that pertaining to an autonomous,
independent individual whose relation to the whole is one of participation,
contribution and exchange. Middlemarch, written at the same time as
Lewes' Foundation of a Creed, accords with the latter's theory of the social
medium's importance in the construction of subjectivity, as differentiated
from the view of "[t]he psychologist, [who is] accustomed to consider the
Mind as something apart from the Organism, individual and collective, [and
who] is peculiarly liable to this error of overlooking that all mental
manifestations are simply the resultants of the conditions external and
internal" (Lewes, Foundations of a Creed, I 128). Furthermore, these
conditions are not merely the present circumstances of society, but "the
collective accumulations of centuries, condensed in knowledge, beliefs,
prejudices, institutions, and tendencies" (Lewes, Foundations of a Creed, I,
124). Bichat's physiological "conception that living bodies, fundamentally
considered, are not associations of organs which can be understood by
studying them first apart, and then as it were federally; but must be
regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues" (ch. 15, 131-2),
is by implication to be extended to the social organism, which Eliot also
describes in terms of a web.' Thus the individual is not to be studied apart
and then as against or within a social framework. Rather, "the events
inward and outward are there in one view." As Shuttleworth deftly puts it,
Eliot's works "do not simply explore the relationship between an
autonomous individual and an external society: social values and
conceptions are actually inscribed within the personality itself" (19).
Thus George Eliot collapses subjectivity into the cultural, while at the
same time resolving the empiricism-induction dichotomy. The historical
imbrication of the observer accounts for the experience upon which
empiricism depends. Just as Bulstrode, as in attempting to look through the
window from a lighted room, is unable to eradicate a vision of his past, so
the scientist, in looking at observable objects, is caught in his own
historical and cultural reflexivity. Since history is essentially the
"accumulations" of experience, however, the connection to empiricism is
not thereby breached. Likewise, superinduced' theory does not run
counter to empiricism, but is really of the same substance, having been
derived from "accumulations of centuries, condensed in knowledge." Of
course, this rings of a kind of higher-order Spencerian or Darwinian
adaptation model of knowledge, in which theories are fitted for or by
experience in a long process of evolution. But this does in no way reverse
or undermine the deconstructive tendency in such a view of science. What
Foucault says about his own work, can be applied to Middlemarch: "It is a
structural study that sets out to disentangle the conditions of its own
history from the density of discourse" (xix). Or, as the narrator of
Middlemarch puts, it: "I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain
human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the
light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web" (ch 15,
126). Interestingly, both of these statements are made to distinguish the
historical method of the respective writer from that of a different kind of
historian. Theirs is the kind of history that aims at what produces
discourses and "how they were woven and interwoven," rather than which
statements were true or false or what action caused what result. Likewise,
Middlemarch does not necessarily attempt to disestablish the validity of
rationality within its given parameters, but rather to interrogate the
cultural and historical conditions that account for those parameters in the
first place. For "[w]hat counts in the things said by men is not so much
what they may have thought or the extent to which these things represent
their thoughts, as that which systemizes them from the outset" (Foucault,
xix).
In Middlemarch, Eliot not only considers the discourse of "men" of
science, but examines that which conditions the discourse. At the same
time, she examines that which conditions the discourse of fiction as well,
with the narrator's "double change of self and beholder"(11, 83) . Parallel
to the rationality that was developing in science, nineteenth-century
fiction attempted a totalizing view, both of which Eliot at once constructs
and destablizes in Middlemarch. The implications of these challenges are
great, for not only was the hegemonic impulse represented in science and
fiction, but in economics as well.
Works Cited
Beer, Gillian, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot
and Nineteenth-century Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1983).
.
Collins, K.K., "G.H. Lewes Revisited: George Eliot and the Moral Sense" in
Victorian Studies 21 (1978): 464-83.
Eliot, George, Middlemarch, The Works of George Eliot (New York: The
University Society Publishers, 1893).
Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaelogy of Medical
Perception, A.M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (New York: Vintage Books,
1973).
Levine, George, Darwin And the Novelists: Patterns of Science in
Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, l988).
Levine, George, "Determinism and Responsibility in the Works of George
Eliot" in PMLA 77 (1962).
Lewes, George Henry, The Foundations of a Creed, vol. 1 (London: 1874).
Mason, Michael York, "Middlemarch and Science: Problems of Life and
Mind" in Review of English Studies 22 (1971).
Miller, J. Hillis, "Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch" in New Casebooks:
Middlemarch, John Peck, ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992)
Newton, K.M., "George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and Darwinism," in
Durham University Journal 66 (1974)
Paxton, Nancy, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism
and the Construction of Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991).
Schleifer, Ronald, Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and
Postmodern Discourse Theory (Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1990).
Shuttleworth, Sally, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The
Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
l984).
FOOTNOTES********************************
{1}
Remarks regarding the predominance of scientific language and ideas in the
writing of Eliot in general, and Middlemarch in particular, date from her
earliest critics and reviewers. Sidney Colvin, Fortnightly Review, N.S. 13
(1873): 142-7; Henry James, Galaxy, 15 (1873): 424-8; Edward Dowden,
Contemporary Review, 29 (1877): 348-69; are among the first commentators on her
scientific allusions. More recent (and thoroughgoing) criticism begins with
Bernard Paris, Experiments in Life (London, l965). See note 2 for a partial
listing of contemporary criticism regarding Eliot's use of science.
{2}
See especially, K.M. Newton, "George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and
Darwinism," Durham University Journal 66 (l974): 278-93; K.K. Collins, "G.H.
Lewes Revisited: George Eliot and the Moral Sense," Victorian Studies 21 (1978):
464-83; and Michael York Mason, "Middlemarch and Science," Review of English
Studies 22 (1971): 154-65. George Levine, in "Determinism and Responsibility in
the Works of George Eliot," PMLA 77 (1962): 268-79; Sally Shuttleworth in
"Middlemarch, An experiment in time," George Eliot and NineteenthCentury Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l984); Gillian Beer in
Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and NineteenthCentury Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, l983), all present more
Eliot-centered analyses.
{3}
In making this statement I do not wish to inscribe Eliot as a token of
feminine scientific individualism. My main argument runs counter to such an
individualistic interpretation of scientific thought.
{4}
The basic challenge to the realm of scientific discourse offered by this
shift may be summarized by the notion of science's bounded-ness within culture.
In George Levine's Darwin and the Novelists, Levine draws on the work of Gerald
Holton to explicate the ramifications of this challenge to the otherwise
transparent rationality of science (5-7). What is brought into
question is not the rationality of science within its own parameters, but the
arbitrariness of the starting points, or the very preconceptions of inquiry,
which are culturally contingent. Holton calls these preconceptions "themata,"
which are not in themselves "verifiable or falsifiable" (qtd. in Levine, 6).
Scientific inquiry, this position argues, follows from theoretical
propositions which are themselves subject to "constraints of culture" which
limit and condition their range and interest.
In the grossest sense, themata may be discerned when science is suspected
of projecting cultural values onto "nature," as Marx claimed that Darwinism had
done with respect to Victorian, capitalist values. Diversification, competition,
adaptation, all have their analogs in Victorian society.
{5}
As George Levine observes in Darwin Among the Novelists, "[s]cience enters
most Victorian fiction not so much in the shape of ideas, as quite literally, in
the shape of its shape, its form" (13, emphasis mine). In Middlemarch, science
enters as shape, form, and idea.
{6}
All Middlemarch page and chapter citations refer to Middlemarch, The Works
of George Eliot (New York: The University Society Publishers, 1893).
{7}
See Sally Shuttleworth's "Middlemarch, An Experiment in time" for an
evocative, thoroughgoing analysis of the notion of the Middlemarch "experiment
in time."
{8}
As K.K. Collins notes, George Eliot not only lived with and read Lewes,
she also edited and compiled his final work, Foundations of a Creed, which she
brought to completion after his death. Eliot completed for Lewes the task which
Dorothea would not for Casaubon, the execution of his will' in the completion of
his great work.' "The Shadow of old Casaubon hangs over me and I fear my Key to
all Psychologies' will have to be left to Dorothea!" (The George Eliot
Letters, V, 291, qtd. in Collins, 463), G.H. Lewes wrote in 1872. "For six
wearing months George Eliot pursued her sacred task' (Letters, VII, 115),
organizing and correcting sheaves of rough, wordy manuscript; within a year she
prepared and published the two final volumes comprising the third series of
Problems of Life and Mind" (463).
{9}
See Nancy Paxton's fascinating discussion, in "Feminism, Evolutionism,
Gender" in George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the
Construction of Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991): 15-42, of
the relationship between Herbert Spencer and George Eliot in connection with his
evolutionary theory as applied to the human sexes. As Paxton observes, Spencer's
earlier agreement with the principles of nineteenth- century feminists is
eventually supplanted by his evolutionist theories. Spencer's theoretical
tendencies are mirrored by his practical relationship with George Eliot (or vice
versa) in which he rejects her as a lover on the grounds of her lack of
"Personal Beauty" (the title of a Spencer essay, 1854). In a subsequent essay,
"Physical Training," Spencer argues that "of the many elements uniting in
various proportions to produce in a man's breast that complex emotion which we
call love, the strongest are those produced by the physical attractions; the
weakest are those produced by intellectual attractions; and even those are
dependent much less upon acquired knowledge than on natural facility--quickness,
wit, insight....one of Nature's ends, or rather her Supreme end, is the welfare
of posterity...as far as posterity is concerned, a cultivated intelligence based
upon a bad physique is of little worth, seeing that its descendants will die out
in a generation or two ("Physical Training, 395, qtd. in Paxton, 33). Spencer's
own rejection of Eliot as a "cultivated intelligence based upon a bad physique"
underscores the cultural contingency of his scientific theory. The question is
not whether Herbert's theory ‘benefited' from his personal experience with
Eliot, but rather that his treatment of gender in both were mediated by his own
cultural biases.
{10} Nancy Paxton in "Theories of Origin and Knowledge" in George Eliot and
Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender
(Princeton: Princeton UP: 1991), claims that this passage is very similar to an
earlier Spencer passage in his Principles of Psychology. (See my text, below).
I would think that this settles the question raised by J. Hillis Miller in his
"Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch" New Casebooks: Middlemarch, John Peck, ed.
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992): 82, footnote 9., as to the identity of the
"eminent philosopher"