Eliot's Angels: George Eliot, René Girard, and Mimetic Desire - Hardcover

Waterman Ward, Bernadette

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0268202648 ISBN 13: 9780268202644

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022

Synopsis

René Girard’s mimetic theory opens up ways to make sense of the tension between the progressive politics of George Eliot and the conservative moralism of her narratives.

In this innovative study, Bernadette Waterman Ward offers an original rereading of George Eliot’s work through the lens of René Girard’s theories of mimetic desire, violence, and the sacred. It is a fruitful mapping of a twentieth-century theorist onto a nineteenth-century novelist, revealing Eliot’s understanding of imitative desire, rivalry, idol-making, and sacrificial victimization as critical elements of the social mechanism. While the unresolved tensions between Eliot’s realism and her desire to believe in gradual social amelioration have often been studied, Ward is especially adept at articulating the details of such conflict in Eliot’s early novels. In particular, Ward emphasizes the clash between the ruthless mechanisms of mimetic desire and the idea of progress, or, as Eliot stated, “growing good”; Eliot’s Christian sympathy for sacrificial victims against her general rejection of Christianity; and her resort to “Nemesis” to evade the systemic injustice of the social sphere. The “angels” in the title are characters who appear to offer a humanist way forward in the absence of religious belief. They are represented, in Girardian terms, as figures who try to rise above the snares of the mimetic machine to imitate Christ’s self-sacrifice but are finally rendered ineffectual. Very few studies have tackled Eliot’s short fiction and narrative poetry. Eliot’s Angels gives the short fiction its due, and it will appeal to scholars of mimetic and literary theory, Victorianists, and students of the novel.

About this title

About the Author

Bernadette Waterman Ward is associate professor of English at the University of Dallas. She is the author of World as Word: Philosophical Theology in Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Excerpt. İ Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Entranced by the lyricism and intensity of George Eliot’s Adam Bede the first time I read it, I found the character Dinah strangely weakened as she sought to convert Hetty, condemned for murder. I began to look back through the book for the meaning of this. George Eliot had been exquisitely rich in her descriptions of farm and dairy, country dance and kitchen work, carpentry shop and drawing-room. Moreover, she had shown sharp, witty insight into the subtle ways people persuade themselves they are doing no harm, or neglect their duties, or miss saying the very thing or seeing the very thing that would join heart to heart. She had been so clear about dynamics in a family devastated by alcohol, so measured in her attention to detail in every least leaf, every gesture that would enrich meaning, that I knew the lapse must be deliberate. And so it was. The narrator intruded with little flurries of explanation at key moments, as if there were something readers should fear about Dinah's Methodism. Puzzled, I investigated early Methodism, but soon realized that was not the source of the strange tension tugging at the story.

Meanwhile, my old friendship with Rene Girard was enlivening a sabbatical at Stanford. As I joined his fortnightly salon, the patterns of behavior described in the mimetic theory began to illuminate Eliot's novels, and the relationships of the novels to the intellectual ferment in which they were written. I increasingly focused my presentations for the Colloquium on Eliot's novels. Besides Girard himself, Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Gil Baillie, Paul Caringella, Randy Coleman-Reese William Hurlbut, Mary Ann Eller and Martin Ford were among the more helpful interlocutors.

A presentation on Daniel Deronda for the Colloquium on Violence and Religion demanded attention to Eliot's biography. The many studies of her life scarcely touched upon the dissonances I had detected; mostly they joined a choir invisible, praising not only her wisdom about human relations and her skill at creating immersive settings, but also her intellectual integrity, her progressive thought, her feminist boldness, and her courage in the face of convention. Her brother's malice had been her great heartbreak; the loyal, loving hero who had awakened her talent and manifested her to the world was her longtime lover, George Henry Lewes.

Except for some of the incidents and locations described in her novels, the heroine of the biographies seemed scarcely connected to voice of her fiction. There was a near-universal presumption in the criticism that humanism was the creed of any intelligent person, and that Christianity was something that had been left behind--rather an embarrassment. This attitude was perhaps consonant with an argumentative strain in her novels, but it did not accurately reflect the conditions of their composition. These were not documents of triumph. Eliot had broken away from her cultural background with resentment and with anguish; the ambivalence pervades her novels. I first detected it in Adam Bede, but it was nowhere to be completely escaped; the Colloquium alerted me to the mimetic dimensions of this cultural tension in itself.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268202648
• ISBN 13: 9780268202644
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 420