THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508240728
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines
GEORGE ELIOT
Voice of a Century
FREDERICK R. KARL
W.W. Norton Co. 708 pp. $30.
To call any writer the ``voice'' of a century might seem a case of aggravated hagiography, or at least simple exaggeration. But Frederick Karl makes a good case for the author of Adam Bede, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, who was ``born into Jane Austen's England and died in Thomas Hardy's.''
George Eliot began life as Mary Ann Evans, near Coventry in 1819. She was born into a tradition-driven society whose rules had been formed and set like concrete for centuries. Protocol demanded certain styles of speech, behavior, dress, religion and strict duty to family, particularly for women. Individual achievements were sometimes acceptable, if they did not violate these rigid standards.
A studious child, Mary Ann lived a privileged life thanks to her father's position as an estate manager. Her relationship with her mother was distant, so Robert Evans often took his daughter along on his rounds.
As the quintessential ``dutiful daughter,'' she spent early adulthood nursing him while her half-brothers built careers and her half-sisters made families. Only after his death did she pursue the career that would transform her into ``George Eliot.''
In a household of dominant men, Eliot learned to be sensitive to their words and actions. She figured out early the contradiction of Victorian society: Do what you will; just keep up proper appearances. Dualism figures heavily in her novels and shapes female characters such as Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch. But Eliot had strong resolve and sometimes invited social sanctions. At 23, she left the Anglican church, much to her family's horror, for the ``religion of humanity.''
For Victorian women appearance was everything, and the large-featured Eliot was plain to the point of homeliness. Her often unhappy life was a long reshaping process - at odds with society, yet clearly longing to belong. She was drawn to erudite married men or narcissistic intellectuals like Herbert Spencer. Working for the Westminster Review she finally bonded with writer/philosopher George Lewes. Their relationship lasted a quarter-century, until his death. Lewes was technically married, but his bohemian wife had earlier defected to another (also married) man and started a second family. Lewes and Eliot supported the estranged wife, assorted children and occasionally the other man. Involvement in this messy menage did not endear Eliot to a moralizing public. She was highly conscious of public censure her whole life.
Lewes acted as Eliot's agent, shielding her from bad reviews, unwanted visitors and convoluted publishing contracts. Eliot became a popular novelist, then a literary lion, and finally a national shrine. Yet her family disowned her because of her relationship with Lewes; some scandalized literary contemporaries, and most of their wives, refused to receive or call on her.
Eliot had her own dualisms. Though she seemed dependent on men, beginning with her father, in fact she assimilated their strengths and moved on. She pushed women's worth and intellect in fiction; but at a time when Darwin and Spencer had dashed women's hopes of significant social change with their imperious theories, she vacillated on supporting important women's issues. She idealized the slow-paced, preindustrial rural England of her childhood, though the poor and workers actually led brutal lives of constant drudgery. She wrote passionately of injustice, yet sometimes seemed oblivious to it in real life. Like many of us, Eliot became more content with the status quo after gaining financial security.
Still she constantly asked hard questions, particularly of herself: Can we overcome weaknesses and faults with leaning on a ``Great Being''? Can we desire, achieve, acquire, without destroying those around us? There is a rebelliousness to her novels, despite the increasingly dense intellectualization of later ones. Some kind of menace, usually blackmail, drives most characters and plots.
She loved contradictions, paradoxes, ironies. A contemporary of Hardy, Trollope and Dickens, she was more formidably intellectual. Henry James idolized her as the perfect writer; later, so would Virginia Woolf.
Today, she seems an imperfect feminist, her works implying that a superior man is the force behind female protagonists - a viewpoint perhaps inescapable in a time when change seemed too distant even to be anticipated. Karl makes much of the odd idea that the homely Eliot created pretty female characters, who desired nothing but marriage, in order to ``persecute'' them. But her strong-willed protagonists were attractive, too. Heroines of the time were at least moderately pretty; along with punishment of the wicked and ultimately happy endings, it was a literary given.
Karl is frank yet tactful, though sometimes prone to breathless footnotes. His Eliot is no sage goddess, but an intelligent writer beset by uncertainties, scarred by past hurts, driven to succeed, hungry for the things we all crave: love, respect, intimacy, security, acceptance. At 700 pages, Voice Of A Century is no beach book. It's a serious investment in page turning, but for writers, thoughtful readers and biography hounds, it's well worth the time. MEMO: Lenore Hart, the author of ``Black River,'' lives on the Eastern Shore,
where she is at work on a second novel. by CNB