by George Eliot
4
As the first reviewers of Felix Holt pointed out, Esther’s ‘inward revolution’ is among one of the greatest strengths of the novel, Eliot’s depiction skilfully conveying the difficulties and temptations which can beset the emerging ‘moral taste’. ‘We are so pitiably in subjection to all sorts of vanity – even the very vanities we are practically renouncing,’ stresses Eliot, and Esther’s ‘vanity’, in spite of her diminishing egoism, ‘winced at the idea that Harold should discern what, from his point of view, would seem like a degradation of her taste and refinement’. Felix offers difficulty where Harold and Transome Court offer ease; the temptation is plain. As Rufus Lyon rightly warns, Esther’s inheritance is ‘a call … to walk along a path which is indeed easy to the flesh, but dangerous to the spirit’.
‘Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult,’ wrote Eliot in Adam Bede,23 and certainly images of temptation surround the easy life which uncritical love might offer as opposed to the ‘difficult blessedness’ of life with Felix. Though notions of right and wrong may be clear, this does not, as in the Garden of Eden, necessarily diminish the temptation proffered, and though Felix may find such rejection easy (‘there are not many easy lots to be drawn in the world at present; and such as they are I am not envious of them’), the resistance of others may be somewhat lower. Esther’s temptation, in the form of Transome Court and a ‘gentleman’ suitor vying for her hand, is entirely apposite for those ‘native tendencies towards luxury’ marked in our first encounter with her. Even late in the novel their allure can remain, and against ‘the knowledge that there is something sweetest and noblest of which we despair’, lies also ‘the sense of something present that solicits us with an immediate and easy indulgence. And there is a pernicious falsity in the pretence that a woman’s love lies above the range of such temptations.’
Succumbing to temptation, however, may bring serious consequences, and Felix Holt is also inhabited by ‘an Eve gone grey with bitter memories of an Adam who had complained, “The woman … she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” ’ Mrs Transome’s silent suffering, the repressed voice of her past, provide potent warnings of the dangers of the wrong choice, the parallels between her own and Esther’s reading making these implications still clearer.24 Whereas Esther’s education is, however, made to progress, Mrs Transome never moves beyond the reading of her youth, and the limitations of that ‘stock of ideas’ instilled by her ‘superior governess’. Her early predilections, given no firmer foundation, hint at the tragedy which lies in wait: ‘She always thought that the dangerous French writers were wicked, and that her reading of them was a sin; but many sinful things were highly agreeable to her, and many things which she did not doubt to be good and true were dull and meaningless.’ Her interest lies in ‘stories of illicit passion’ but, as Eliot makes plain, ‘the notion that what is true and, in general, good for mankind, is stupid and drug-like, is not a safe theoretic basis in circumstances of temptation and difficulty’, and so it is to prove. As for Esther, the construction of herself in the discourse of romance, with its attendant susceptibilities to ‘homage’ (especially from a graceful young man who ‘kneeled to her and kissed those hands fervently’ so that it seemed that ‘there was a poetry in such passion beyond any to be found in everyday domesticity’), brings its own dangers.25 Arabella Transome (her very name further connoting a heroine of romance) finds no safeguard against indulgence when opportunity presents itself. As Jermyn recollects, ‘he and another bright-eyed person had seen no reason why they should not indulge their passion and their vanity, and determine for themselves how their lives should be made delightful in spite of unalterable external conditions’.
‘We are saved by making the future present to ourselves,’ writes Eliot, and though no such salvation is conferred upon Mrs Transome for whom ‘the passions of the past’ live on in her dread, Esther’s own perceptions are sharpened on this score. As she gradually realizes, ‘in accepting Harold Transome she left the high mountain air, the passionate serenity of perfect love … and must adjust her wishes to a life of middling delights … where poetry was only literature, and the fine ideas had to be taken down from the shelves of the library when her husband’s back was turned’. It is Felix who instead opens up the world of ideas, with his refusal to let Esther remain in the narrow ‘littleness’ of many women. As this further contrast reveals, notions of (and attitudes to) gender are implicated in the choice which she must make, and while both Felix and Harold are familiar with the gender stereotypes of women in nineteenth-century society, Felix strives to force Esther to confront the limitations which popular ideologies of femininity hold whereas Harold is content to endorse them. ‘You’ve had to worry yourself about things that don’t properly belong to a woman,’ Harold tells his mother. ‘Women, very properly, don’t change their views, but keep to the notions in which they have been brought up. It doesn’t signify what they think – they are not called upon to judge or to act.’
5
Eliot’s treatment of gender in her novels has often been seen as problematic, her heroines inevitably ending in domesticity and in private rather than public spheres. Cultures of difference are well embedded in the structures of her texts, and supported in her writing elsewhere, while in Felix Holt Esther differentiates between her feelings for Harold and Felix on grounds which appear somewhat shaky, at least from a strictly feminist point of view. ‘She herself had no sense of inferiority and just subjection when she was with Harold’, we are told in his disfavour, while ‘a sense of dependence and possible illumination’ surround meetings with Felix. As with Eliot’s reservations on the import of political change for the wider meaning of men’s lives, similar reservations attend the ‘woman question’ of the nineteenth century. ‘ “Enfranchisement of women” only makes creeping progress; and that is best, for woman does not yet deserve a much better lot than man gives her,’ Eliot wrote to Mrs Peter Taylor in 1853, though her essay on ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’ reveals another side to her position: ‘We want freedom and culture for woman, because subjection and ignorance have debased her, and with her, Man.’26
Eliot’s irony on the score of ‘female ignorance’ is certainly marked in Felix Holt, whether relating the Misses Debarrys’ fallible grasp of history or Mrs Transome’s received ‘store of correct opinions’. Though Harold accepts, and indeed expects, ignorance as part of the female condition, Felix, in his role as ‘demagogue’, is notably critical of Esther’s initial adherence to sensibility above sense: ‘You have enough understanding to make it wicked that you should add one more to the women who hinder men’s lives from having any nobleness in them.’ He adds, ‘If a woman really believes herself to be a lower kind of being … she should be ruled by the thoughts of her father or husband. If not, let her show her power of choosing something better.’ This equation, and the notion of the choice that women must make, runs through the novel, informing a range of constructions of gender identity from the thwarted potential of ‘the foolish women who spoil men’s lives’ (‘Men can’t help loving them and so they make themselves slaves to the petty desires of petty creatures’)27 to ‘the force there would be in one beautiful woman whose mind was as noble as her face was beautiful – who made a man’s passion for her rush in one current with all the great aims of his life’.
Though Esther’s choice between Felix and Harold may, as Alison Booth has contended,28 thus initially appear to be between one misogynist and another, the treatment of gender in the novel is in fact refracted in more complex ways. ‘Men pay a heavy price for their reluctance to encourage self-help and independent resources in women,’ writes Eliot,29 and while the discourse of power in which both Harold Transome and his mother construct notions of love is ultimately revealed as flawed, other versions in which mutuality and partnership dominate emerge as Eliot’s (and Esther’s) ideal. ‘Harold had a padded yoke ready for the neck of every man, woman, and child that depended on him,’ Esther realizes, providing a conc
ise image of the imbalance involved in his relations with others, a perception further reinforced by the revelation that his first wife was ‘a slave – was bought, in fact’. Harold’s conception of the domain of female choice is narrow, arrogating to its ‘proper’ (and male) use the power Mrs Transome had wielded before his return, leaving her the power of choosing in restricted (and stereotypically female) spheres: ‘[he] let her choose what she liked for the house and garden, asked her whether she would have bays or greys for her new carriage, and was bent on seeing her make as good a figure in the neighbourhood as any other woman of her rank’. Even in deciding to marry Esther, ‘it had never entered into his mind that the choice did not rest entirely with his inclination’. This disregard for the significance of woman’s choice is aligned with other preferences which work to limit and negate the possibilities of female identity: ‘Western women were not to his taste: they showed a transition from the feebly animal to the thinking being, which was simply troublesome. Harold preferred a slow-witted, large-eyed woman, silent and affectionate, with a load of black hair weighing much more heavily than her brains.’
Such assumptions are antithetical to Felix’s own, and, whereas he does indeed engage upon a critique of common constructions of female identity in the nineteenth century (albeit construed in dominantly male terms), he also engages upon potential ‘reform’ in this sphere too, berating Esther for her attention to the superficial: ‘Now I want you to see what shallow stuff that is.’ He pressures her to change in a way which, to Harold’s mind, would be entirely incompatible with the nature of woman per se: ‘I ought to say you are perfect. Another man would, perhaps. But I say, I want you to change.’ If Harold willingly adopts the discourse of romance with Esther, praising her appearance even if neglecting her mind, then Felix does the converse, refusing to resort to the conventional iteration of compliments to such an extent that when compelled to acknowledge Esther’s beauty, ‘she started and looked round at him, to see whether his face would give some help to the interpretation of this novel speech’. It is a shift in consciousness at which he aims, and a move from self-preoccupation to a sense of the wider things of the world where ‘moral taste’ holds greater sway than niceties of manner and dress. His teaching, as in his political philosophy, is directed towards the eradication of superficial and selfish desires, and the efficacy of his lessons is readily perceptible in the diminishing language of self which Esther employs. ‘Self-contentment’, ‘self-respect’, and ‘self-satisfaction’ are all disturbed by a new compound, ‘self-criticism’, as Esther is ‘stung into a new consciousness’ for the first time. Though Harold Transome is dismissive of the potential of women (‘[he] regarded women as slight things, but he was fond of slight things in the intervals of business’), Felix is insistent on the real capacities of Esther, refusing to believe in her ‘littleness’: ‘No, you are not an insect. That is what exasperates me at your making a boast of littleness.’ He urges her instead into a less egotistical relationship with the world: ‘You are discontented with the world because you can’t get just the small things that suit your pleasure, not because it’s a world where myriads of men and women are ground by wrong and misery, and tainted with pollution.’ Ultimately, of course, it is he, and not Harold, who is proved right, and Felix (in the language of religion which is so often associated with him in the novel),30 secures Esther’s redemption so that, unlike Mrs Transome, she can and will make the right choice as to her future, rejecting the temptations with which she is faced.
‘A woman can hardly ever choose in that way,’ says Esther early in the novel of Felix’s stated vocation in life; ‘she is dependent on what happens to her. She must take meaner things, because only meaner things are within her reach.’ Her words are recalled at Transome Court, though the language of choice replaces that of taking: ‘A woman must choose meaner things, because only meaner things are offered to her.’ The difference is important, ‘meaner’ itself taking on new resonances as Esther realizes that the ‘meaner’ life is actually that of Transome Court: ‘this life at Transome Court was not the life of her day-dreams; there was dulness already in its ease, and in the absence of high demand; and … the vague consciousness that the love of this not unfascinating man who hovered about her gave an air of moral mediocrity to all her prospects’. She chooses instead the ‘harder’ life which appears as the ‘better lot’. Though difficult – ‘on each side there is renunciation’ – as she tells Felix, ‘Since I have been at Transome Court I have seen many things very seriously. If I had not, I should not have left what I did leave. I made a deliberate choice.’ In this important sense Esther fulfils the terms of Felix’s original demand, showing (and deploying) the ‘power of choosing something better’.
Mrs Transome’s own choices in the past bring instead a long-lasting ‘entail of suffering’ as an inheritance which she cannot cast off, and in Felix Holt it is she who utters the bitterest pronouncements on ‘women’s lot’. Rendered ‘as useless as a chimney ornament’, ‘part of the old furniture with new drapery’, she is displaced by her son’s return, her activity without a purpose (‘that soothing occupation of taking stitches to produce what neither she nor any one else wanted’), and her voice silenced by the fear which dominates her life. ‘God was cruel when he made women,’ she declares, though she later retracts her words: ‘I would not lose the misery of being a woman, now I see what can be the baseness of a man. One must be a man – first to tell a woman that her love has made her your debtor, and then ask her to pay you by breaking the last poor threads between her and her son.’ She and Jermyn return to the garden, an Eve still reproached and an Adam who continues to blame; there is no peaceful resolution for the temptation taken so many years ago, and its ‘hereditary, entailed Nemesis’ will continue to work out its own calamitous resolution. For Esther, ‘the dimly-suggested tragedy of this woman’s life, the dreary waste of years empty of sweet trust and affection, afflicted her even to horror. It seemed to have come as a last vision to urge her towards the life where the draughts of joy sprang from the unchanging fountains of reverence and devout love.’
Esther’s ‘inward revolution’ involves a shift in the range of signifiers by which she had previously ordered her life; constructions of ‘gentleman’ and ‘lady’, ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’, ‘meaner’ and ‘better’ have all changed by the novel’s end, and in her decision to leave Transome Court she also escapes the constraints of ‘fine-ladyism’ and feminine ideology which had so curtailed her vision at the beginning of the tale. The cushions and candles of her early dreams of luxury are dispelled and the superficial ease of Transome Court proves to be ‘well-cushioned despair’ where Mrs Transome buries her head ‘in the deafening down of the cushions’. ‘I never went in for fine company and cushions,’ says Felix in contrast, and this is of course to be Esther’s choice too, in her realization of a different type of ‘goodness’ from that experienced by Mrs Transome (‘good as men are disposed to be to women, giving them cushions and carriages … and then expecting them to be contented under contempt and neglect’). Such has been Mrs Transome’s lot. Esther’s, however, will be different, fulfilling more closely Eliot’s own ideal of the partnership which can exist in that ‘human love, the mutual subjection of soul between a man and a woman – which is also a growth and a revelation beginning before all history’,31 or, as it appears in Felix Holt, the ‘supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman’s life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul’s highest needs’. Esther’s awakened moral sense and ‘higher consciousness’ (like that of Fred Vincy in Middlemarch as a prelude to his marriage to Mary Garth) provide a sounder basis for the future, and Felix too changes, his determination not to marry confounded, and his habitually forthright tones betraying a new awareness of his own sensibilities in his growing converse with Esther.32
‘Anything is more endurable than to change our established formulae about women,’ wrote Eliot in 1855, ‘or to run the risk of looking u
p to our wives instead of looking down on them.’33 Her irony is marked, though in Felix Holt it is Harold who, unironically, adheres to these conventional assumptions about woman’s role, and Felix who, at least for Esther, is determined upon this change, and succeeds. Though the culture of difference is not negated (‘ “I am weak – my husband must be greater and nobler than I am” ’), Felix Holt does nevertheless provide some reassessment of woman’s role for, as Gillian Beer stresses, ‘what was needed to be claimed by women when George Eliot began to write was not difference, which was taken for granted and used to circumscribe women, but likeness: likeness of capacity, of emotional force and endurance, above all, likeness of access before real difference could be discovered’.34 It is this potential which Felix strives to realize in Esther, and which Esther in turn fulfils, assuming her own ‘heroism’ in the trial scene, and discarding the ‘littleness’ of which she herself was once accused. ‘Likeness’ in this context is proved without doubt.
NOTES
1. See also Appendix A.
2. See Chapter XXXV, note 3.
3. John Morley, unsigned review of Felix Holt, Saturday Review, 16 June 1866. In D. Carroll (ed.), George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971), p. 253.
4. E. S. Dallas, unsigned review of Felix Holt, The Times, 26 June 1866, p. 6. In Carroll (1971), p. 264.
5. John Morley, in Carroll (1971), p. 253.
6. ibid., p. 254.
7. E. S. Dallas, in Carroll (1971), p. 265.
8. F. C. Thomson, ‘Felix Holt as Classic Tragedy’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (1961), p. 47.
9. B. Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London, 1959), p. 62.
10. R. T. Jones, George Eliot (Cambridge, 1970), p. 49.
11. S. Dentith, George Eliot (Brighton, 1986), p. 79.