Spirit Becomes Matter: The Brontes, George Eliot, Nietzsche 9780748694594

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Spirit Becomes Matter

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Volumes available in the series: In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres Saverio Tomaiuolo 978 0 7486 4115 4 Hbk

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Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions Trish Ferguson 978 0 7486 7324 7 Hbk Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate Jessica Howell 978 0 7486 9295 8 Hbk Spirit Becomes Matter: The Brontës, George Eliot, Nietzsche Henry Staten 978 0 7486 9458 7 Hbk Forthcoming volumes: Her Father’s Name: Gender, Theatricality and Spiritualism in Florence Marryat’s Fiction Tatiana Kontou 978 0 7486 4007 2 Hbk British India and Victorian Culture Máire ni Fhlathúin 978 0 7486 4068 3 Hbk Women and the Railway, 1850–1915 Anna Despotopoulou 978 0 7486 7694 1 Hbk The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities Patricia Pulham 978 0 7486 9342 9 Hbk The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson Kostas Boyiopoulos 978 0 7486 9092 3 Hbk

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Spirit Becomes Matter The Brontës, George Eliot, Nietzsche

Henry Staten

EDINBURGH University Press

© Henry Staten, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9458 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9459 4 (webready PDF) The right of Henry Staten to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface vi Author’s Preface viii Acknowledgementsx Introduction I: Victorian Physio-Psychology and Nietzsche II: Critical Moral Psychology in the Novels

1 9

1. The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)31 2. Subincision of the Ethical Subject (Middlemarch)76 3. What Things Cost in Middlemarch112 4. The Return to the Heath (Wuthering Heights)132 5. Spirit Becomes Matter

177

Index188

Series Editor’s Preface

‘Victorian’ is a term at once indicative of a strongly determined concept and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought, belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institutional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal definition, and have sought to question the very grounds on which the unreflective perception of the so-called Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually open-minded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists, pursued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the ­nineteenth century. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from

Series Editor’s Preface    vii

convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity. At the same time, the series will ask questions concerning what has been missed or improperly received, misread, or not read at all, in order to present a multi-faceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations. Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the series will seek to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated close readings of the historicity of literature and culture in the nineteenth century, to offer the reader provocative insights into a world that is at once overly familiar and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from original sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theoretical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth century, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional, strategic redrawing of those borders. Julian Wolfreys

Author’s Preface

The traditional moral psychology practised by the earlier realist novel involved an ironic, rather than strictly critical, treatment of the moral consciousness of characters. The realist narratorial voice spoke from an authoritative moral perspective that was grounded on the established religio-moral values (altruism, goodness, self-restraint, forgiveness) all of which are modalities of the fundamental Christian value of self-denial. From the perspective of the unquestioned validity of these ‘ascetic ideals’, as Nietzsche called them, the traditional narrator was able to communicate to the reader the real motives behind what the narrated persons consciously told themselves, and to assign their proper moral weight to these motives. By contrast, the novels at the centre of the present study show that, beyond the difficulties individuals have in thinking and acting according to the established moral values, there is something problematic about the values themselves, and specifically about their ideal nature. Nietzsche was the first to bring the critique of ideal values to fully explicit statement, notably in The Genealogy of Morals, but he was not the first to practise it; among his precursors, I argue, are Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë and George Eliot. The practice these four writers in some measure share I call critical moral psychology. When I first began, some twenty years ago, to think along the lines developed in this book, it worried me that I should be thinking back from Nietzsche to these novelists and finding affinities between them. I didn’t want to find things in the novels that weren’t there; and I certainly didn’t want to treat these great writers as mere adumbrations of Nietzsche. Only gradually did I realise that the work on Victorian physio-psychology or ‘mental materialism’ that I kept coming across was crucial to my own project. The pioneering work on Victorian physio-psychology, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, had been published by my old friend and colleague at Utah Bruce Haley in 1978, and I had read it then; but I didn’t realise its significance until a few years

Author’s Preface    ix

ago when I reread Sally Shuttleworth’s 1996 book on Charlotte Brontë and Rick Rylance’s 2000 book on Victorian psychology. At last it became clear to me that the same ‘energetic systems’ thinking in human physiology that was developed by Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and G. H. Lewes, and which underlies the thought of the Brontës and George Eliot, also underlies that of Nietzsche, and I began to see how critical moral psychology evolved from this paradigm. The final piece of the puzzle was provided by Gregory Moore’s 2002 book on Nietzsche and biological thinking, which established that Herbert Spencer (the central figure of British mental materialism at mid-century) had had an important, possibly crucial, influence on Nietzsche’s own turn toward a biologically based theory of ‘will to power’. The thinking of the Brontës, George Eliot and Nietzsche runs to a certain degree along parallel tracks, thus, because they all came out of what is, in the relevant respect, the same intellectual milieu. Although there is a ‘theory’ behind my readings in this book, I have tried to be as strictly faithful as possible to the form of each novel as a whole, beginning, middle and end – more faithful, I think, than has ever been common in literary criticism. I have referred to Nietzsche’s thought primarily as a lens through which certain patterns in the novels can be initially discerned; once discerned, these patterns can be tracked quite naturally out of the novels themselves. Since I have tried to keep theory as much as possible in the background, I will say a few words here about this book’s theoretical underpinnings in some of my earlier work. In Wittgenstein and Derrida (1984) I treated Derridean deconstruction as a critique of the philosophical ideology of consciousness, thus laying the earliest foundation for my present turn to the critique of moral consciousness specifically. In Nietzsche’s Voice (1990) I began to develop the concept of critical moral psychology (which I misguidedly named ‘psychodialectic’) on the basis of a reading of Nietzsche’s oeuvre. And in Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (1995) I traced the history in Western literature of the Christianidealist meditation on mortal love, a meditation motivated by revulsion from the death and decomposition of the erotic body – a body typically identified as feminine. There is no getting to the bottom of the moral ideology derived from Christianity without an understanding of how it is rooted in this revulsion. The chapters on Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in this book are very closely linked to Eros in Mourning. I discuss the key novels not in chronological order, but in a conceptually more natural sequence.

Acknowledgements

Like many scholarly books, this one has been a long time in the making, and has assumed its final form under the impact of various critical gazes. My colleague Marshall Brown here at Washington gave me an initial jolt when, having read the original version of my chapter on Jane Eyre, he remarked that it wasn’t up to my usual standard – a response I took to heart. More recently, two other colleagues, Kathleen Blake and Charles LaPorte, read the semifinal version of the entire manuscript. The detailed commentaries by these two superb Victorianists have been invaluable to me in shaping the final version. I was helped through the very last stages of work by a Briton whom I know only from our years-long email correspondence, an independent scholar named David McCallum. David patiently helped me work through the perplexity into which I had worked myself at the end of the writing process, for which I owe him a special debt of gratitude. I am grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for a grant in 1998–9 that enabled me to begin work on this project, and to the University of Washington for a Royalty Research Fund grant in 2011 that gave me a quarter free to write. Substantial portions of Chapter 3 were originally published in my article ‘Is Middlemarch Ahistorical?’, PMLA 115.5 (October 2000): 991–1,005.

For Leo and Marco

Introduction

I: Victorian Physio-Psychology and Nietzsche The night Jane Eyre, now an heiress, welcomes her cousins Diana and Mary back to Moor House from their exile as governesses, the celebration of their return is interrupted by a youth whose mother is dying, and who asks St John to come minister to her. The young women have been very happy celebrating, but this is not the kind of thing St John enjoys, and he has been restless; now, despite the fact that it is late, there is no road, and it is a bitter winter night, he readily agrees to go to the dying woman. . . . he was already in the passage, putting on his cloak, and without one objection, one murmur, he departed. It was then nine o’clock; he did not return till midnight. Starved and tired enough he was: but he looked happier than when he set out. He had performed an act of duty; made an exertion; felt his own strength to do and deny, and was on better terms with himself.1

St John performs ‘an act of duty’, a moral act involving self-denial; but pragmatic Jane sees it as the physical working out of a physiological energy, with a corresponding moral-psychological effect. He has ‘made an exertion; felt his own strength to do and deny’, an exertion involving a long, difficult trek through a wintry countryside, and this has left him ‘on better terms with himself’. What is at work here in Charlotte Brontë’s representation of St John is what Graeme Tytler, speaking of Wuthering Heights, has called ‘the assumption of man’s close biological kinship with the animals’, with the corresponding tendency to understand human character and motivation in biologically grounded terms.2 Another aspect of Charlotte Brontë’s physio-psychological perspective is visible in Jane’s evaluation of Mr Mason’s physiognomy, in comparison with Rochester’s:

­2    Spirit Becomes Matter For a handsome and not an unamiable-looking man, he repelled me exceedingly: there was no power in that smooth skinned face of a full oval shape, no firmness in that aquiline nose, and small, cherry mouth; there was no thought on the low, even forehead; no command in that blank, brown, eye.   . . . I compared him with Mr Rochester. I think . . . the contrast could not be much greater between a sleek gander and a fierce falcon: between a meek sheep and a rough-coated keen-eyed dog, its guardian. (192–3)

Jane reads their faces in a way that mixes Lavaterian physiognomy with the new kinds of biologically based moral values that are dominant in Wuthering Heights, but which uneasily co-exist in Jane Eyre with Charlotte Brontë’s conservative moralism.3 Jane’s negative reaction to Mr Mason is extreme (she is ‘exceedingly . . . repelled’), given that she sees no moral fault in him. What she finds lacking is simply attributes of power: he lacks ‘firmness’, ‘power’ and ‘command’. She also mentions ‘thought’, of course, but this attribute is marginal; and the central values are summed up in animal imagery. Jane’s judgement of the two men is rooted in Byronism but, like her account of St John’s exertion, is shaded by the changes that had taken place in the scientific understanding of human beings since Byron. In the period between Byron and the Brontës even the highest functions of mind, including morality itself, became widely understood as subject to physiological explanation. This trend was highly controversial; it was widely felt that psycho-physiology and physio-psychology denied the existence of the supernatural soul. Yet Victorians of all stripes became obsessed with their own physiologies, and Victorian morality culturewide took on a new, naturalistic inflection.4 In the popular understanding, no doubt, the interpretation of physical health and vitality as a moral phenomenon could be made without disturbance to the belief in the supernatural nature of the moral faculty, just as cleanliness could be associated with godliness; more scrupulous thinkers like Herbert Spencer, however, understood the depth of the challenge that the new naturalism posed to both the old supernaturalism and the more recent ‘natural supernaturalism’. On this new understanding, morality could be reduced, as Spencer wrote in 1851, to ‘a species of transcendental physiology’.5 The naturalistic interpretation of mind took root primarily in the segments of society that were attracted to reformist and radical political views in the aftermath of the first and second French revolutions. As Adrian Desmond has explained in his masterful study of the dissemination in England of British materialist biology before Darwin, the naturalists held that if man is an animal and the functions of mind are rooted in physiology, then morality and social organisation too are products

Introduction    3

not of divine design but of natural process – from which it follows that society is open to utilitarian reformist tinkering or revolutionary overthrow.6 In the first half of the nineteenth century, mental materialism spread into medical thought and became widely influential among the upwardly aspiring lower classes, including the middling segment of society to which the Brontës belonged. In Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, correspondingly, the value and significance of the putative supernatural order, in its connection with the established systems of morality and of social hierarchy, are critically probed from a naturalistic standpoint. The old supernaturalistic inclinations do not, of course, disappear from the thinking of even those most committed to the new naturalism; what we find is, rather, an increasingly fine-grained dialectical struggle between old values and beliefs and the new facts of physiology. This dialectic comes to a head with George Eliot, who was at once more committed to materialist scientific explanation, and also to the ideal moral values of Christianity that such explanation was in the process of eroding, than were the Brontës. Rick Rylance, in his invaluable account of Victorian physio-psychology, sums up Eliot’s situation in this regard very well: . . . it is possible to see the quarrels in liberal intellectual circles over the new psychology in the late nineteenth century as quarrels about the purchase rival languages might have on . . . the description of the inner life and moral choice. It is possible, for instance, to understand George Eliot’s fiction in this way. Her novels are formed from a complex, multi-vocal discourse in which the competing languages of the period vie for descriptive adequacy.7

In Middlemarch, as in Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s first two novels, The Professor and Jane Eyre, the physiological understanding of moral psychology opened the way to a genuinely critical moral psychology that broke decisively with the earlier British tradition of novelistic moral psychology. Because they could now conceive moral values as natural, and therefore revisable, these novelists began to break through the wall of ideality that had formerly set limits to the critical probing of moral values. Later in the century, and emerging from the same milieu of ‘physiological morality’, critical moral psychology found its major philosophical exponent in Nietzsche.

­4    Spirit Becomes Matter

The Energy Paradigm As Alan Richardson has shown, the materialist, physiological understanding of mind was already well under way in the late eighteenth century in the work of thinkers like Hartley and Erasmus Darwin.8 This current of thought began to lose influence after 1810; but, according to Desmond, a new naturalistic impetus was provided in the 1820s by French post-revolutionary materialist thought, in particular by the ‘philosophical anatomy’ of the Lamarckian Geoffroy St Hilaire. Desmond documents in impressive detail how Geoffroy’s thought flowered in the medical schools of Edinburgh in the 1820s and then in those of London in the 1830s and 1840s.9 This new ‘republican science’ taught that the fundamental life-energy was a natural product of physio-chemical organisation, and that human beings along with the rest of the animal kingdom had evolved on the basis of the ‘self-developing energies’ of physio-chemistry. As Desmond explains, materialist biology lent itself perfectly for use in political opposition to the established order at every level. If atoms simply acting in accord with physical laws could organise themselves into living, and eventually thinking, beings, then individual voters acting out of their own self-developing energies could shape the organisation of society by acting from below.10 In reaction to these views, conservative interests developed their own idealist interpretations of anatomy and physiology, based on natural theology and Coleridgean biology, in an attempt to beat back the influx into the medical profession of the new, non-Anglican, non-gentlemen practitioners trained by the radical schools. Desmond shows that this new materialist biology was in some ways more radical in its naturalism than Darwin’s theory of evolution, for which it prepared the way. As Bruce Haley explains, by the mid-1840s the physiological explanation of mind was mounting an acute challenge to the notion that mind and matter were distinct substances; if both matter and mind were forms of energy, or, as T. H. Huxley wrote, ‘centres of force’, there was no reason to think of mind as something extra-natural that was exempt from the laws of nature.11 And if mind is a natural phenomenon, then all its functions, including the moral will, should be explicable on the basis of purely natural facts. Human motivation must be explained on the basis not of the metaphysical conflict of good and evil, but of the energetic flows of physiology and of the sociohistorical conditions that give new levels of organisation to these flows. But then, the moral ideology based on the concept of the supernatural soul loses its intellectual basis.

Introduction    5

Haley’s and Desmond’s work fills in the larger background to the mental materialism of the Brontës that Sally Shuttleworth has illuminated in relation to phrenology.12 Phrenology was an early attempt to track psychology back to localised brain functions that, despite the bad name it has acquired, in fact stimulated research that eventually led to the modern conception of the brain.13 As a form of mental materialism allied to reformist and radical social causes, phrenology was a natural ally of Geoffroy’s ‘higher anatomy’, and phrenologists were among its early supporters.14 As upwardly aspiring, relatively disempowered, middle-class women, the Brontës belonged to the stratum of society that was most enthusiastically receptive to these theories; Shuttleworth shows that Charlotte in particular was deeply influenced by phrenology in her thinking about psychology. All the young Brontës were also exposed to the materialism of the new, scientific medical thinking in a casual, everyday way from their contact with medical men and the medical books to which their father was devoted, an experience reflected in Lucy Snowe’s allusion in Chapter 23 of Villette to the ‘dry, materialist views’ of doctors.15 The ferment of naturalistic notions about mind in which the Brontës participated culminated in the 1850s and 1860s in the psycho-­physiology of Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and George Eliot’s consort G. H. Lewes. By 1881 (when the movement was, however, about to wane) Spencer felt justified in declaring the total victory of the new physiological naturalism among scientists. ‘No anatomist, no physiologist, no chemist’, he wrote, ‘will for a moment hesitate to assert, that the general principles which rule over the vital processes in animals equally rule over the vital processes in man.’ This being the case, he enjoined the British to consider the preservation of physical health ‘a duty’, and ‘all breaches of the laws of health . . . physical sins’. In this way they would become ‘a nation of good animals’ who need not fear ‘trials of strength with other races’ either in war or in commerce.16 In Spencer, thus, the values of Charlotte Brontë’s fierce falcon are, so to speak, domesticated for use by barnyard roosters (as indeed Rochester is domesticated at the end of Jane Eyre). With Spencer we come to a demonstrable link between the British tradition of physiological psychology and Nietzsche. Thanks to Gregory Moore’s groundbreaking investigations into Nietzsche’s reading, we now know that Spencer played an important role in Nietzsche’s turn around 1880 to his physiologically based ‘will to power’ theory of morality. Despite his disgust at the moral tendency of Spencer’s thought, which merely translated the Christian value of altruism into a naturalistic register, Nietzsche was enthusiastic about Spencer’s 1879 Data of

­6    Spirit Becomes Matter Ethics, and developed his own theory of will to power in dialogue with Spencer’s thought.17 The German and the Englishman shared the view that mind and morality must be traced back to physiology, physiology to the dynamics of evolution, and evolution to competition among individuals. Moore’s discovery of Nietzsche’s engagement with Spencer allows us, somewhat startlingly, to place Nietzsche in the mainstream of Victorian physio-psychological thought. Once one is alerted to this fact, the parallels between Nietzsche’s thought and that of the British become apparent, parallels that reflect a shared conceptual paradigm.18 As Rylance explains, already by 1855 Bain had broached the physio-psychological notion most corrosive to traditional notions of soul, mind and moral will, the notion that the organism is a container of ‘nerve energy’, defined as a pure quantum of qualitatively undifferentiated, spontaneous force that waits to be released in whatever direction some ‘stimulus’ happens to set it off.19 ‘The nervous system’, Bain wrote in The Senses and the Intellect, may be compared to an organ with bellows constantly charged, and ready to be let off in any direction, according to the particular keys that are touched. The stimulus of our sensations and feelings, instead of supplying the inward power, merely determines the manner and place of the discharge.20

This is basically the same model for which Nietzsche takes credit three decades later, in The Gay Science, as ‘one of [his] most essential steps and advances’: I have learned to distinguish the cause of acting from the cause of acting in a particular way, in a particular direction, with a particular goal. The first kind of cause is a quantum of dammed-up energy that is waiting to be used up somehow, for something, while the second kind is . . . for the most part a little accident in accordance with which this quantum ‘discharges’ itself in one particular way – a match versus a ton of powder.21

Nietzsche differs from Bain in rhapsodising about the magnitude of the ‘quantum’ and minimising the significance of the release-occasioning stimulus; but both accounts open the way to understanding the will as, at bottom, a movement of quantities of energy or force, understood in a completely non-moral, physicalist way.22 The energy paradigm is rooted in rigorously scientific physiological investigation, but it leaves plenty of room for development in what is essentially a metaphorical way, as in the passages cited above from Bain and Nietzsche, or in the idea of the organism as a hydraulic system in which a sort of fluid presses for discharge.23 Shuttleworth has identified how a partly scientific, partly metaphorical paradigm of ‘energy

Introduction    7

dynamics’ becomes widespread in the thought of the era, probably, as Boyd Hilton suggests, as a consequence of the near-simultaneous discovery by several thinkers of the principle of conservation of energy in the 1840s.24 Shuttleworth shows how physio-psychology operates within a larger context of economic and social energy dynamics, and has tracked the operation of this dynamics in the fiction of the Brontës and Eliot. Wuthering Heights, like Jane Eyre, ‘charts the histories of its protagonists through an economics of energy flow’.25 But it is George Eliot in Middlemarch who most directly follows the hydraulic model. Dorothea Brooke’s energy is described in terms of ‘flowing water and streams’, a metaphor that had been developed by Spencer, who compared the action of ‘discharges of molecular motion . . . along the lines of least resistance’ to ‘the flow of a liquid’; and the thought of Middlemarch as a whole is influenced by the idea, borrowed by Eliot from Lewes, ‘that psychology was based on the physiological flow of energy, the tendency of sensation to “discharge itself through the readiest channel”’.26 George Levine has argued that the Darwinian notion of chance mutations had a profoundly destructive effect on the Victorian belief in a divinely ordered world; but since, as Levine himself says, mutationbased evolution ‘could itself be described precisely’, according to scientific ‘laws’, this kind of chance only breaks down the idea of divine order because such laws operate ‘apart from any intention or meaning’, thus producing order ‘in an exclusively naturalistic sense’.27 The fundamental challenge to the Victorian worldview is thus the challenge of naturalism itself; and this challenge had already been mounted before the Origin of Species by the ‘mental materialism’ of philosophical anatomy and physio-psychology – intellectual movements that attacked the religiomoral standpoint at its very root, by undermining the very notions of mind, soul and will on which the order of society and of the individual’s own moral life had previously been based.

Physiology and the Critique of Morality Like the Victorian physio-psychologists, Nietzsche replaces the concept of the executive mind-soul with the metaphor of energetic quantity. ‘A quantum of force’, he writes in the Genealogy of Morals, ‘is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, affect – more, it is precisely this very driving, willing, effecting . . .’ (GM I, 13).28 And once the action of the will is explained in this way, all animal striving can be understood on the basis of one simple model: the drive to unimpeded, optimal expenditure of energy.

­8    Spirit Becomes Matter Every animal instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power; every animal abhors, just as instinctively . . . every kind of intrusion or hindrance that obstructs or could obstruct this path to the optimum (I am not speaking of its path to happiness, but its path to power, to action, to the most powerful activity . . .). (GM III, 7)

Once we begin to place the notion of will to power in its Victorian context, it starts to sound as banal as the popular Victorian notions to which physio-psychology was so closely related – notions about the organically rooted drive ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’ evoked in Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’. As modern debates over this poem have shown, however, the empty bluster suggested by Tennyson’s line quoted in isolation is highly misleading; in the context of the whole poem, there is an explosive tension between, on the one hand, the limitless urge to pursue ever-receding horizons in the service of one’s own organic drive to action and, on the other hand, the life of domestic and patriotic duty to which this drive is nominally yoked, and to which Ulysses leaves his son Telemachus. We could imagine Nietzsche reading ‘Ulysses’ and asking: what if we were to push the moral implications of Ulysses’ drive to their final, logical and ideological, conclusion? The notion of limitless will to power merely makes explicit, in all its Christian-morality-dissolving power, this explosive potential that was there from the beginning in the Victorian turn toward a Spencerian conception of physical sin grounded in the strong, healthy psyche-soma and its drive to activity.29 With the concept of will to power, Nietzsche articulated the principles of the non-moral, or trans-moral, moral psychology that is practised by the Brontës, Eliot and Nietzsche himself. We can see exactly what Nietzsche shares with the physiological morality of the Victorians, and where he goes beyond it, in the following schematic breakdown. I list the main tenets of Victorian physio-psychology, tenets that constitute the naturalistic substratum on the basis of which even religious and idealist thinkers of the period conceive morality (as the case of Carlyle, who sees soma as an aspect of mind rather than the other way round, demonstrates): 1. physiology, psychology and morality are indissolubly bound together 2. the physiological-psychological-moral system is driven by a quantum of spontaneous biological energy that ineluctably seeks discharge 3. there is an optimal state of the organism, called health, in which the energetic quantum is at its peak (a state that Spencer says it is a ‘moral duty’ to maintain, and a ‘sin’ to impair)

Introduction    9

4. there are optimal forms of discharge, forms that satisfy the urge to discharge in the way most consonant with the state of health 5. healthy energetic discharge is intrinsically consonant with, or even the very substance of, conventional moral virtue and social uprightness 6. the absence of channels for optimal discharge results in a derangement or stunting of the entire energetic system – physiological, psychological and moral. Nietzsche shares all but the fifth of these tenets, which asserts the consonance of the urge to discharge one’s quantum of energy with the accepted social and moral values. This doctrine enabled the Victorians to reconcile their new naturalism with their nominally Christian morality, and Nietzsche’s denial of it is what makes him so radical for the period. When Nietzsche denies this consonance and posits the will to power in its nakedly trans-moral nature, he brings into the open the conflict between the physiologically based values of individual self-assertion and restless striving – the values that were being fostered by the new economic order – and the ‘herd morality’ (as Nietzsche calls it) to which these values were being yoked.

II: Critical Moral Psychology in the Novels Nietzsche’s theory of will to power is subtle, complex and beset with contradictions, and it is needless to expound it as such in this book.30 As the schema provided at the end of the preceding section shows, Nietzsche makes it possible to attain conceptual clarity regarding the issues at the heart of my study; but once we are properly on the track of the ‘will to power’ perspective, we can see, with minimal further reference to Nietzsche, how this perspective is woven into the moral psychology of the novels. To demonstrate this, I will now focus on a passage from Charlotte Brontë’s early (and badly underrated) novel The Professor (which was written before Jane Eyre, but published posthumously). Charlotte Brontë was no more disposed to frontal confrontation with the values or religion of her time than were other Victorians, yet this passage shows an understanding of the psychology of will to power that equals Nietzsche’s at his most subtle. From the beginning of this novel the narrator-protagonist William Crimsworth, an impoverished gentleman, is engaged in a fully conscious power struggle against others, whom, one after another, he bests – first his brother, then his employers and students at the schools in Belgium

­10    Spirit Becomes Matter where he teaches.31 Even his relationship with the woman he loves, Frances Henrí, is based on Crimsworth’s calculated, at times rather chilling manipulation of his personal ascendancy over her; a manipulation that, as Shuttleworth observes, ‘displays all the aggressive will to power that rules his earlier associations’, yet which the narrator treats as straightforwardly consistent with his deep and sincere love for her – and which, indeed, she enjoys.32 In the target passage, Crimsworth describes Frances Henrí’s power relations with her pupils: . . . she liked to learn, but hated to teach; her progress as a pupil depended upon herself, and I saw that on herself she could calculate with certainty; her success as a teacher rested partly, perhaps chiefly, upon the will of others; it cost her a most painful effort to enter into conflict with this foreign will, to endeavour to bend it into subjection to her own; for in what regarded people in general the action of her will was impeded by many scruples; it was as unembarrassed as strong where her own affairs were concerned, and to it she could at any time subject her inclination, if inclination went counter to her convictions of right; yet when called upon to wrestle with the propensities, the habits, the faults, of others, of children especially, who are deaf to reason and, for the most part, insensate to persuasion, her will sometimes refused to act; then came in the Sense of duty and forced the reluctant Will into operation. A wasteful expense of energy and labour was frequently the consequence; Frances toiled for and with her pupils like a drudge, but it was long ere her conscientious exertions were rewarded by anything like docility on their part, because they saw that they had power over her, inasmuch as by resisting her painful attempts to convince, persuade, control – by forcing her to the employment of coercive measures – they could inflict upon her exquisite suffering. Human beings – human children especially – seldom deny themselves the pleasure of exercising a power which they are conscious of possessing, even though that power consist only in a capacity to make others wretched; a pupil whose sensations are duller than those of his instructor, while his nerves are tougher and his bodily strength perhaps greater, has an immense advantage over that instructor and he will generally use it relentlessly, because the very young, very healthy, very thoughtless know neither how to sympathise nor how to spare. (159)

Most of the essential characteristics of will to power are articulated in this passage. First. The passage manifests a quasi-aristocratic standpoint on the part of the narrator, a sense of the division between the superior person and what Nietzsche called ‘the herd’. As with Nietzsche, the superiority in question is a matter of personal qualities, not of class standing as such; the crassest of Frances’s pupils are, in fact, of aristocratic origin. The ultimate superiority for Nietzsche or Brontë, as for other nineteenth-century thinkers, is based on a refinement of spirit and intellect only indirectly related to wealth or social status. Neither does

Introduction    11

superiority of this kind issue directly from brute biological vitality. Rather, power is a spiritual or intellectual ‘executive’ function of some sort, rooted in physiology, but operating in human beings in ways that are mediated by culture.33 Second. True superiority of rank order is primarily defined here as the ability to command one’s own will (from which, in theory, follow both the right and the power to command others). The refinement of Frances Henrí’s spirit is shown by the fact that her will, when applied to her own actions, is pure and perfect; she can ‘at any time subject her inclination’ to her ‘convictions of right’. By contrast, when she has to ‘bend’ the wills of her pupils ‘into subjection to her own’, it causes her much pain, and she must have recourse to ‘the Sense of duty’ to activate her will. Third. The fact that moral concepts like ‘the Sense of duty’ and ‘convictions of right’ function as supplements to the power of Frances’s will, giving it vitality when it weakens, shows that will to power is tightly woven into moral ideology, from which it can only with great difficulty be disentangled, if at all. This observation is fundamental to critical moral psychology, and will be at the centre of my reading of Jane Eyre in the next chapter. Fourth. The final sentence, beginning with ‘Human beings – human children especially’, coolly identifies as organic or physiological the basis of the struggle for dominance, in a way that could have been written word for word by Nietzsche. As in Nietzsche, physiology is here fundamental but not determinative. Greater bodily strength does not necessarily translate into greater effectual power, because effectual power depends on a complex interaction of the physiological, the mental and the cultural. Thus, on the side of the pupils, who play the role of the weaker here, we find tougher nerves, greater bodily strength and great health, but also duller sensations and great thoughtlessness. On the side of Frances Henrí we find a weaker and less healthy body; but sharper sensations and power of thought, and a very strong will, combined with a cultural position that enables her to leverage her physio-psychological quantum of energy. However, the strength of her will, ‘unembarrassed’ when it functions in a self-regarding way, is combined with refined conscientiousness in her relation to others, and this causes her to feel ‘many scruples’ when she must apply her own will to the subjection of other wills. The mere contact with these brutish wills that are ‘deaf to reason’, and which take pleasure in forcing the superior person to coerce them, is intensely painful to her more refined sensations and nerves; and this gives the pupils a certain power over her. Fifth. The passage shows how the will to straightforward predominance,

­12    Spirit Becomes Matter when squelched, metamorphoses into the desire by the inferior – the students in this case – to exercise power over the superior – their teacher – indirectly, by inflicting pain. The fact that Frances Henrí’s pupils are impelled to act in this way is explained by the fact that ‘Human beings . . . rarely deny themselves the pleasure of exercising a power which they are conscious of possessing . . .’.34 But in this case the resulting pleasure is a corruption of authentic power-pleasure, because it is an indirect, underground sort of power. The rebellious pupils gain nothing but the sadistic pleasure of making their teacher feel wretched, while they nevertheless must ultimately submit to her will; and the power to make wretched is itself a wretched thing, especially when it is not only exercised from a position of subjection, but secures this subjection more firmly, as is the case here. The students’ exercise of power, which produces a pleasure that can, from the standpoint of physio-psychological moral theory, with precision be called perverted (one produced by a drive that has been wrongly turned, per-verted, from its ‘natural’ pathway to expression), is a form of what Nietzsche calls the will to power of the slave. For Brontë as for Nietzsche it is characteristic of superior human spirits that, unlike the slave spirit, they do not turn to such perverted subterfuges of will to power even when they are powerless. For a superior or ‘healthy’ spirit, the drive is always toward an ‘active’ or ‘affirmative’ release of energy, one that is an exercise of freedom, with freedom conceived not metaphysically but in terms of the unimpeded flow of psycho-physiological energy. From a present-day perspective, such a notion of natural flow is naïvely biologistic; my purpose here, however, is neither to complete the nineteenth-century theory nor to criticise it for its limitations, but to show how far it is pushed in a certain critical function by the writers on whom I comment.

The Inward Turn of the Instincts and Ascetic Will to Power Crimsworth exemplifies the Victorian split moral consciousness at work: acutely realistic and even cynical in its understanding of the struggle for dominance that drives society, and yet subjecting this demystified perception to the morality of Christian goodness, or, as in Spencer’s notion that evolution’s struggle for survival intrinsically leads to altruism, a goodness no longer Christian but indistinguishable from it. Shuttleworth has shown that Brontë takes considerable ironic distance from Crimsworth, but it is not clear exactly how far this irony reaches. Despite her understanding of the will to power perspective, her irony

Introduction    13

in The Professor does not appear to extend to the system of Christian moral values Crimsworth consistently invokes. In Jane Eyre, by contrast, Brontë conceives a female subject in active conflict with certain elements of this system. I will engage with this questioning and this resistance in Chapter 2; here I want to focus on the glimpse Brontë provides in Jane Eyre of the process by which the system of moral ideology is implanted in the child Jane. Heather Glen has provided an intensively historicised account of the evangelical child-rearing pedagogy to which Jane Eyre is subjected, and which was pervasive in Brontë’s time.35 But, while Brontë is indeed, as Glen shows, wrestling with a specific, historically localised brand of Christian morality, she is also struggling with certain foundational doctrines of Christianity, which to be brought into view require a more generalised, historically longer-range view than Glen’s.36 In this longer-range view, Christian moral ideology is based on what Nietzche in the Genealogy of Morals calls the ‘inward turn’ of the instincts – the process by which the subject’s outwardly directed aggression and self-affirmation are turned back against the self and transformed into the feeling of guilt (GM I, 17, 86–7). This is the process of conscience-formation, and all civilisation depends on it in one form or another; but in cultures that articulate the subjugation of the aggressive instincts with an ascetic religious worldview, this inward turn becomes physio-psychologically toxic. We catch a sharp glimpse of this process in the scene following Jane’s verbal assault on her aunt Mrs Reed that follows Brocklehurst’s visit to their home. Here we see her punishers attempt to implant the moral judgement against herself into Jane’s subjectivity by getting her to apply the concepts ‘wicked’ and ‘bad’ to her feelings of rebellion against the unjust treatment to which she is subjected. The ideological form of the inner experience of guilt is prepared pre-verbally or ‘intoned’ – in this case, by physical abuse – but the ideological system is locked in by the securing of the verbal labels.37 Here is the scene: Mrs Reed . . . shook me most soundly, she boxed both my ears, and then left me without a word. Bessie supplied the hiatus by a homily of an hour’s length, in which she proved beyond a doubt that I was the most wicked and abandoned child ever reared under a roof. I half believed her; for I felt indeed only bad feelings surging in my breast. (39)

The process of ideological intoning of her subjective state has its intended effect. She feels rage at her mistreatment and aggressive urges against her oppressors, but she now begins to perceive these affects as ‘bad’, as something culpable that she must split off from her essential, rational self, condemn and reject. And yet the condemnation does not

­14    Spirit Becomes Matter go to the roots of her being, as it does for the true believer; she only ‘half believes’ Bessie’s judgement of reprobation. This moment in Jane Eyre has special significance for critical moral psychology because it focuses on the act of ideological implantation that lies at the base of Christian morality in its classic, orthodox form: the primordial judgement of guilt that is laid on the aggressive instincts. Jane’s organic selfhood, however, remains strong and relatively intact; as her first encounter with Brocklehurst suggests, she is still essentially a pagan. When Brocklehurst asks her what she must do to avoid going to hell, she replies, in good psycho-physiological fashion: ‘I must keep in good health, and not die’ (43). The feeling of guilt never does become dominant in her; but she will not meet her sternest test from the religious morality system until her agon with St John Rivers. Leaping from Jane’s conflict with her aunt to the much later struggle with St John takes us from the fairly simple and straightforward moment of value-implantation in Jane that I have just glanced at all the way to a full-scale engagement with the religious metaphysics that underlies the earlier moment, but which at that time has not yet been fully articulated in the novel. The questions with which Jane as an unsustained orphan is confronted throughout the novel are, as Glen has acutely noted, existential questions. What does her very existence as a human being mean, and what is it worth to those around her? But implicit in these questions, at their furthest limit, lies this one: what is the value of this world itself, and of a human existence as defined only in terms of this kind of value? Ascetic Christianity replies that this life has no value purely as such, in itself, apart from some further end; its only value lies in its being the necessary preliminary to the next life. This question, and the question of the validity of this answer, lie on the horizon of Brontë’s inquiry in this novel from the beginning, and are finally brought front and centre by St John. The dimensions of Charlotte Brontë’s intellectual achievement in her portrait of St John, which anticipates by thirty years Nietzsche’s epochal account in the Genealogy of Morals of the figure he calls the ‘ascetic priest’, have never been properly appreciated. Nietzsche’s entire critique of Christianity centres on his account of the ascetic priest, who is the most consummate expression of the inward turn of morality. The ascetic priest is he who identifies his will absolutely with the condemnation of spontaneous drive and desire, and in this way takes absolute control over himself. Only the perfectly autonomous, perfectly self-commanded will is perfectly moral; hence, Nietzsche reasons, the will to perfectly moral being is also the ultimate will to power, and ascetic morality is the purest and most perfect culture of will to power.

Introduction    15

But the ascetic does not gain power only over himself, he also gains power over those around him, a power rooted in his judgement against this world. For the ascetic priest all value derives from God, from the other world; only by means of this universal evacuation of value from the world is it possible to deceive the physiological surge of energy within the individual in order to turn it against itself. The ascetic priest is remarkable for the sheer magnitude of his quantum of energy. Only someone with enormous intensity of drive and desire can become a true ascetic priest in the Nietzschean sense – someone like the St Augustine of the Confessions. Only such a being possesses the quantum of physio-psychological energy that is necessary for the complete sublimation of drive into ascetic will – a quantity of energy that could have been used to exert force on this world, but which the ascetic priest disdains so to use because the possibilities of satisfaction offered by this world fall short of his desire. Thus the inward turn: by poisoning the wells of drive and desire, the ascetic priest fulfils in an inverted or perverted way the imperative that governs every animal, to ‘expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power’ (GM III, 7). This is precisely how Charlotte Brontë represents St John. As his own words to Jane explain, he understands perfectly that his spiritual mission of conquest is a sublimation of his unfulfilled lust for worldly power. A year ago I was . . . intensely miserable, because I thought I had made a mistake in entering the ministry . . . yes, the heart of a politician, of a soldier, of a votary of glory, a lover of renown, a luster after power, beat under my curate’s surplice . . . After a season of darkness and struggling, light broke out and relief fell . . . my powers heard a call from heaven to rise, gather their full strength, spread their wings, and mount beyond ken. God had an errand for me; to bear which afar, to deliver it well, skill and strength, courage and eloquence, the best qualifications of soldier, statesman and orator, were all needed: for these all centre in the good missionary. (354)

Brontë captures every nuance of the psychological economy of the ascetic priest. She shows how the lust for power described above involves a repression or sublimation by St John of his almost overwhelming erotic desire for the beautiful Rosamond, and a breathtaking self-command by means of which he clamps down on this desire. And, in the most fascinating pages of this novel, she anatomises the structure of self-deception by which St John authorises himself to use the word of God, and in particular the doctrine of forgiveness, as instruments of his attempt to take possession of her by means of marriage. In the end he manifests all the toxic moral force of ascetic priesthood; and the struggle between Jane’s will to keep possession of her own selfhood and St John’s will to

­16    Spirit Becomes Matter appropriate her – the struggle that forms the central focus of my Chapter 2 – makes clear the way in which Jane’s fight for autonomy is also her struggle against the ascetic Christian morality for which St John speaks.

George Eliot on Ascetic Will To turn from Jane Eyre to Middlemarch is to pass from a world in which the struggle with the questions of God and super-nature are the very substance of the drama to a thoroughly secular world, one in which Christian belief and Christian believers are just one area of sociological fact among others. Unlike Charlotte Brontë, who still seems in some vague way to believe in an afterlife, George Eliot was, apparently, ‘convinced of utter annihilation’.38 Despite her rejection of Christian supernaturalism, however – or perhaps, as Nietzsche and others argue, because of it –­ Eliot adhered with undiminished intensity to the ascetic self-abnegation she had learned from Christianity. Nothing better illustrates this than her often quoted declaration to Frederic Myers that God was ‘inconceivable’ and immortality ‘unbelievable’, but Duty ‘peremptory and absolute’. ‘[H]er grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a sybil’s in the gloom,’ Myers’ account continues; ‘it was as though she withdrew from my grasp . . . the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates.’39 Immanuel Kant had already in the eighteenth century severed the moral law from God, declaring it autonomous and self-uttering, and in the course of the nineteenth century an increasing number of English intellectuals made the same separation.40 Nietzsche noted this English tendency, and named Eliot as its prototype. G. Eliot. – They have got rid of the Christian God, and now think that they have to hold on to Christian morality more than ever: that is an English form of consistency, and we do not want to blame the moral little females à la Eliot for it. In England, every time you take one small step towards emancipation from theology you have to reinvent yourself as a moral fanatic in the most awe-inspiring way.41

Eliot is deeply invested, for non-metaphysical reasons, in the ascetic morality of the self-abnegators she depicts, from Maggie Tulliver and Savonarola to Felix Holt, Dorothea Brooke and Daniel Deronda. This is well known. What has not been noticed is the equally compelling interest that Eliot has in the will to power that works in and through the ascetic morality of her protagonists, beginning, in a peculiarly revealing way, with Savonarola.

Introduction    17

Her husband George Lewes had written a book on Robespierre, and Bernard Semmel makes the plausible suggestion that Eliot’s Savonarola, who briefly re-established the Florentine republic, was partly modelled on the French revolutionary.42 Like Lewes’s Robespierre, Eliot’s Savonarola is marked equally by ambition and by ascetic self-denial; and Renaissance Florence – that very Florence that provided Nietzsche with his own model of post-classical nobility – provides the natural historical context for the mixture of Christian self-abnegation and pagan love of glory that Savonarola embodies. Eliot’s Savonarola is, like Brontë’s St John, an exemplar of pure ascetic priesthood; but because Savonarola lived in Renaissance Italy, in which the love of glory still had some of its pagan meaning, Eliot can portray him as avowing this love in a way that is denied to the more complexly ascetic St John, or to Dorothea Brooke. In Romola’s summing-up statement regarding Savonarola in the book’s final chapter, the moral and the non-moral are confused in a way that seems naïve from a nineteenthcentury perspective, but is appropriate to its historical moment: We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it as good.43

Romola’s remark suggests that the sensation of the highest happiness is often indistinguishable from pain, in which case it is identifiable as happiness only ‘because our souls see it as good’. This seems to be pure asceticism: a complete excision of the criterion of pleasure from the definition of happiness. And yet, this comes in the context of a quasiclassical prizing of earthly power and glory: the ‘highest happiness’ is defined by the pious Romola as that which ‘goes with being a great man’. ‘Everything that I have done,’ Savonarola is quoted as saying in his printed confession, ‘I have done with the design of being for ever famous in the present and in future ages; and that I might win credit in Florence; and that nothing of great import should be done without my sanction . . . [W]hen I should have achieved the work I had in view, I should, without being Pope, have been the first man in the world in the authority I should have possessed, and the reverence that would have been paid me.’ So far this is pure love of glory and power; but Savonarola then explains that his contemplated superiority to the Pope will be based on his virtues. ‘A man without virtue may be Pope,’ he continues, ‘but such a work as I contemplated demanded a man of excellent virtues.’44 The desire to be virtuous is for Savonarola not only compatible with the

­18    Spirit Becomes Matter desire for glory; the sense that one’s glory is founded on virtue serves to heighten the enjoyment of the glory. The good conscience of this enjoyment is impossible for any sophisticated modern moral consciousness; that is why Eliot has to go back to Renaissance Florence to find it. For Christian moral ideology of the modern type (which is closer, in fact, to the classical Christian moral consciousness of an Augustine, or of most places and times in the Christian era, than was Renaissance Florence), one cannot be virtuous if one aims directly at the gratification to be derived from prestige and power; if they come at all, they must be a mere by-product of one’s aim at virtue, and must not be an essential part of what is aimed at. But the narrator of Romola does not criticise Savonarola’s partly pre-Christian conception from the more rigorous standpoint on virtue that Eliot herself held. On the contrary, the inextricability of Savonarola’s will to power from his aim at the good is seen as woven into the nature of the physio-psycho-moral order: ‘Perhaps no man has ever had a mighty influence over his fellows without having the innate need to dominate, and this need usually becomes more imperious in proportion as the complications of life make Self inseparable from a purpose which is not selfish’ (621). This remarkable notion – that a person’s need to dominate others increases in proportion to the identification of the self with an unselfish purpose – suggests a radically new perspective in which to view Dorothea Brooke. Dorothea, like Savonarola, pursues the mortification of her creaturely drives, yet is driven by irresistible subterranean impulses of social predominance – impulses that Dorothea, unlike Savonarola, cannot avow. Eliot thus focuses her attention on the tortuous movements of moral consciousness in Dorothea by means of which she attempts to justify her every powerseeking impulse to herself as a form of pure self-sacrifice.45 Consider, for example, the following passage, in which Dorothea articulates to herself her motives for marrying Casaubon: I should learn everything then . . . It would be my duty to study that I might help him the better in his great works. There would be nothing trivial about our lives . . . I should learn to see life by the same light great men have seen it by . . . I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life here – now – in England.46

Her moral ideology condemns her will to power, making her unable to recognise her desire to ‘learn everything’ and to see by ‘the same light great men have seen by’ as the intellectual ambition that it is, and as her own ambition. She can only allow it into her consciousness under the guise of submission to higher authority, as her duty. But Eliot, her narrator and the perceptive reader are all sharply aware,

Introduction    19

without any help from Nietzsche, that Dorothea is self-deceived in the passage cited, because her real motive is desire, inclination or selfishness, not submission to duty. Substitute any of these terms for ‘will to power’ in my comment on the passage; doesn’t the point remain essentially the same? In fact it does not. The axis of the entire inquiry begins to be rotated by its translation into the modality of will to power – in Lewes’s terms, of physio-psychological energy seeking discharge by the ‘readiest channel’. The language of moral ideology in terms of which Eliot’s narrator interprets Dorothea’s ethical strivings is normed by the ideal of genuine selflessness. From this standpoint, what is wrong with Dorothea’s moral-psychological economy at this point is that it isn’t yet ascetic enough – that she has not yet attained the submission to duty that leads to a truly self-abnegating sense of the other as what the narrator calls ‘an equivalent centre of self’. From the standpoint of physio-psychology, by contrast, Dorothea’s attempt to sacrifice herself does not lead through the self-deceptions of egoism to authentic ethical purity, but to more tortuous twistings of aggressive energy. That is not to say that her sympathy is therefore inauthentic. The sympathy that Eliot depicts in her novels has been criticised as what Suzy Anger in her response to these criticisms calls ‘a hidden manifestation of self-interest’ that can be connected with ‘appropriation and even sadism or masochism’.47 Anger and, more recently, George Levine have countered these criticisms by demonstrating how great an awareness Eliot’s novels show of the difficulty of achieving anything like pure, disinterested sympathy.48 The argument here, however, is not that Eliot perceives or misperceives the moral reality of sympathy, but rather that Eliot fitfully pursues a fundamental rethinking of the system of moral concepts with which we think about moral psychology, based on the new physio-­ psychological understanding 49 of mind. Physio-psychological energy will out: both sympathy and self-interest are caught up in the larger field of forces that is defined by the functioning of this elemental principle, and in Eliot that larger field is conceived very much in terms of what Anger calls ‘the themes of domination and appropriation’ (126). Anger notes that these themes are present in Daniel Deronda, treating Eliot’s recognition of them as a late development in her thought; but they are in fact pervasive in Eliot’s mature work, and reflect her deep, and in part trans-moral, insight into the economy of physio-psychological energy – as in the stunning Savonarola principle that the need to dominate increases in proportion to the selflessness of the purpose. It is, however, questionable whether as she wrote Middlemarch

­20    Spirit Becomes Matter Eliot-scriptor was able to keep explicitly in mind the insights into will to power at which she had arrived in Romola. When she has Dorothea express the desire to know everything, Eliot-scriptor gets hold of stirrings of will to power in Dorothea’s consciousness that cannot be adequately explained in her narrator’s pre-scientific system of moral concepts, and that the author herself does not know how to translate into some other, philosophical language. Nevertheless, as I show in Chapter 2, in the book as a whole the working of Dorothea’s impulse to power is depicted with a meticulously naturalistic eye – although in a way that frequently fails to tally with the moral discourse of the narrator that accompanies this depiction.50

Will to Power and the Social Outside In the 1980s an influential group of critics, including John Kucich, Deirdre David, Catherine Gallagher and Daniel Cottom, firmly established the view that had earlier been floated by Terry Eagleton, and earlier yet by Raymond Williams, that Eliot’s work elides the social and political in favour of ‘culture’, morality and individual interiority. This is, obviously, a very complex charge, and how much validity there is in it depends on how each critic frames it, and with respect to which novel; but in relation to Middlemarch I extensively laid out the case against it some years ago.51 Chapter 4 here restates the case for the historical probity of Middlemarch that I made in that article, but this time from a new, physio-psychological angle. My focus here is on the fact that Will Ladislaw, who is the link between Dorothea and the socio-political outside, is not only not an ascetic like Dorothea, he is a hedonist, in the philosophical sense of the term, one who takes his own pleasure as his best guide to action. Thus, in the course of the novel, he begins to pursue political reform for the same reason he formerly pursued art, as an expression of his ‘shaping energy’. He thus stands out in the ensemble of all of Eliot’s major characters, who tend strongly toward asceticism, as a unique physiopsychological type. The same ascetic motives that drive Dorothea to strive for complete moral autonomy, however, also pull her toward Ladislaw’s poverty and marginal social status from the time of her return to England with Casaubon, and at the end of the novel, marriage to Ladislaw will force her to confront the fundamentals of economic reality from which her class position has formerly insulated her. This turn clearly suits her; she has no taste for the comforts of the wealthy. If she cannot live in a way

Introduction    21

that will satisfy her desire for great achievement, she can at least live in a way that is more in harmony with her ascetic impulses. Once we begin to think in ethico-socio-political terms, it becomes evident that in the overall design of the novel Lydgate’s position forms a triangle with those of Dorothea and Ladislaw. On the one hand, Lydgate, who scoffs at reform, is in thrall to the same quasi-aristocratic class ideology as Dorothea, an ideology that dictates unconsciousness of ‘what things cost’, while unlike her he has no ascetic drive to escape from this condition; on the other hand, he remains in crucial ways the ethico-political antitype of the hedonistic Ladislaw, who takes pleasure in ‘belonging to no class’, has no fear of poverty, and devotes himself to the cause of reform. Chapter 3 shows that this triad is scrupulously contextualised by Eliot, not only in terms of the contemporary political situation (the debate over the Reform Bill and the eruption of the French revolution of 1830), but by a critical representation of class, class ideology and the economics of estate management (the base of the country gentry’s wealth). The novel displays a concrete and detailed understanding of the motive of profit that necessarily concerns the country gentry, despite their pretence of being above such motives, and that enmeshes even such a sentimentalised figure as Garth. Middlemarch thus shows up as the centrepiece of a sustained meditation on the question of how ascetic will to power could be socially and historically efficacious. Dorothea Brooke belongs in a line of ascetic Eliot protagonists that includes the eponymous hero of Felix Holt and Savonarola in Romola, protagonists whose projects all founder, for different reasons and at different stages in their unfolding. And the conclusion of these novelistic thought-experiments, at least up to Middlemarch, seems to be that the ascetic’s is a fundamentally flawed form of will to power, and that a different, non-ascetic form of physiopsychological economy needs to be considered in its possibilities of historical manifestation. Daniel Deronda, of course, made a hard turn back towards ascetic will to power; but in order to do that Eliot had to conceive an entirely new social modality – that of the quasi-mystical Jewish ethnos – within which it could operate.

Beyond Moral Ideology: Wuthering Heights The materialisation of spirit in Wuthering Heights takes a quite different form than it does in the work of Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot. Emily Brontë’s naturalism, unlike that of the other Victorians, is complete; she

­22    Spirit Becomes Matter is not interested in the tortuosities of consciousness caught in the web of the morality system. As I show in Chapter 4, Emily Brontë peremptorily draws the ultimate consequences of a thoroughly naturalistic view of the world, a view that has given up both the metaphysics and the morality of nineteenth-century religio-moralism, treating the dynamics of interaction between her characters entirely in physio-psychological terms.52 For the reading proposed here, the most resonant moment in the entire novel, the one that determines how we should read it in its ultimate ethical and philosophical bearings, is when Catherine, after announcing to Nelly Dean her decision to marry Edgar Linton, recounts the dream she once had of being in heaven, among the angels, and finding herself miserable there. ‘Heaven did not seem to be my home,’ she says, and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy.53

The entire novel sustains the force of this decision for the earth, a decision that is the very substance of Catherine and Heathcliff’s being. And yet, not long before her death Catherine says to Nelly and Heathcliff, ‘I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it.’ When she gets there, she says to them, she will be ‘incomparably above and beyond’ them (196–7). What do these statements betoken with respect to what I am calling her decision for the earth? Is Catherine experiencing a deathbed conversion? ‘Glorious world’, ‘above’ and ‘beyond’ seem unequivocal indications that she is thinking of transcendence, which would mean that Catherine has suddenly, and in a way for which nothing in the novel has prepared us, decided that heaven is her home. At the beginning of the next chapter Nelly repeats Catherine’s words, interpreting them in precisely this way, though she herself remains dubious as to whether Catherine belongs in heaven. A great deal rests on how we take these almost-final words of Catherine’s. Does she, like the James Cagney character at the end of Angels with Dirty Faces, at the last minute go over to the side of the angels? The book loses much of its point, in that case. Consider that just moments before, she has said to Heathcliff, ‘I only wish us never to be parted – and should a word of mine distress you hereafter, think I feel the same distress underground, and for my sake, forgive me!’ And during her delirium she had said to him: ‘they may bury me twelve feet deep . . . but I won’t rest till you are with me . . .’ (164). After Catherine’s death, Heathcliff seems to think that at the end she has transiently and falsely deviated from her

Introduction    23

earth-boundness. ‘Why, she’s a liar to the end!’ he shouts at Nelly. ‘Where is she? Not there – not in heaven – not perished – where?’ (204) Later in the novel he shows that he himself has no doubt as to where she actually is: in the grave that he longs to share with her. The grave as final terminus: this is the notion that the novel persistently places at the centre of its vision. But Catherine remains ambivalent about this. In Emily Brontë’s lyric poetry there is sometimes a similar poise between a beyond that is truly beyond, and one that remains worldly; but in the lyrics this poise has commonly been read as tipping toward spiritual transcendence. Here the evidence, as I read it, is decisive that it goes the other way.54 Yet it does so in an agonised fashion. As much of Chapter 4 demonstrates, what Brontë actually wrote in Wuthering Heights will not sustain either the lessons critics have attempted to find in it about transcendent passion, natural drive or Blakean energy, or, more recently, those about race, class and the rise of capitalism; neither is there any leap to pure affirmation of the earth in Nietzsche’s style. That the novel makes some sort of affirmation has been generally agreed by generations of readers, but it is of an obscure kind, and, on many readings, finding one at all has depended on the elision of many inconvenient details. The problem with looking for life-affirming values of any familiar sort in Wuthering Heights is that Brontë goes to such lengths to discredit Heathcliff as a spokesman for them. Even Nietzsche’s affirmation of this life in this world seems somewhat ideal when set alongside this novel. Nietzsche can manage his ‘yes’ only by imagining Zarathustras and Übermenschen; Emily Brontë gives us Heathcliff the dog-strangler, whose chief motivations after Catherine’s death are vengefulness and greed, and who dies with a goblin leer on his face, desiring only to have his body decompose together with Catherine’s. Moreover, whatever Emily Brontë ‘is saying’ in and through this novel, she has taken care to distance herself from Heathcliff and Catherine’s story through the agency of the double frame narration. The form that Nelly gives to her narration must be distinguished from the larger form that is Emily Brontë’s, and which uses Nelly’s narration as one of its structural elements – by far the most important element, since it extends across most of the novel’s pages, yet is still contained within a larger whole. Once we begin to make this separation, we begin to realise how conscious is Brontë’s mastery of form in this novel, and how much distance she takes from the overheated passions at the centre of her ­narrative – though not on the side of Nelly Dean’s religio-moral standpoint, as has occasionally been suggested. This distance doesn’t mean in the slightest that she takes these passions less seriously, but it does mean

­24    Spirit Becomes Matter that she has woven them into the tapestry of a meditation on worldly being and also on art, and the relation between the two, that throws the naturalism of the depiction, and the nihilism on which it abuts, into a wholly new perspective.

Notes   1. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Beth Newman (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), p. 385. I cite this edition throughout.   2. Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 251–2.  3. Tytler assigns Wuthering Heights a transitional place midway between Lavater and Darwin’s Expression of Emotions in Men and Animals in its understanding of physiognomy.  4. On the rise of physio-psychology, the reaction to it of religious and philosophical conservatives, and the general obsession with health in the period, the groundbreaking work was Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).  5. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1883), ch. 30, sec. 12.   6. Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).   7. Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 232.   8. Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). As Richardson notes, however, the major mental materialists in this period, such as Hartley and Erasmus Darwin, remained dualists who did not question the ultimately supernatural nature of mind.   9. Coleridge, who had been waging a campaign against materialism since his crisis with associationism in the 1790s, was disgusted by this development and was a major influence on the conservative campaign against it. 10. Desmond, The Politics of Evolution, p. 265. 11. Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, pp. 36–43. 12. Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 13. See Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 14. Desmond, The Politics of Evolution, pp. 63–7. 15. Shuttleworth cites a letter from Patrick Brontë in which he mentions John Elliotson, a leader of the movement to reform the London medical schools along the lines of the new anatomy, as one of his household medical authorities (253, n. 37). Desmond cites a contemporary who describes Elliotson as ‘the strongest materialist’ of his day. 16. Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881), pp. 224, 282–3, 222. 17. Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge

Introduction    25 University Press, 2002), pp. 61 ff. Moore notes that Nietzsche urged his own German publisher to acquire the rights to the translation of this book. Spencer’s book appeared in German translation the same year it was published, a sign of Spencer’s importance beyond Britain and America. 18. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche complained that his ignorance of physiology in his youth was the ‘real calamity’ of his life, and traced this ignorance back to the ‘complete worthlessness of . . . German education – its “idealism” – . . . which teaches one from the outset to ignore realities . . .’ (EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, sec. 1–2); but this calamity would not have befallen him if he had been raised in the England of the period, which was far ahead of him in its sense that mental processes are directly bound up with nutrition, exercise, climate and health generally. Cited from The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1968). 19. In The Senses and the Intellect, Bain credited the German physiologist Johannes Müller as the source of the notion of nerve energy, but, as Robert Young points out, Müller himself was influenced by Erasmus Darwin, who in turn was drawing on the physiologically based associationism of Joseph Hartley. Robert Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 116. See the account of the earlier theories of nerve energy in Richardson, British Romanticism, pp. 1–38. 20. Quoted by Rylance, Victorian Psychology, pp. 176–7. 21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), §360. 22. Cf. Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, p. 43. Rylance (p. 198) gives the following account of how Bain explained the physiological origins of the will in The Emotions and the Will: There it is argued that there is a spontaneous discharge of nervous energy (though Bain notes that at present it is impossible to specify the actual anatomical mechanism or physiological nature of this discharge). Gradually, through repetition and other factors (like environmental conditions), certain paths of discharge become facilitated and regulated, most particularly those related to certain organs or muscles. The will originates in the complex development of these neurological processes . . . For example, one of the will’s sources of origin lies in the action of the muscles, the ‘organic condition’ of which stimulates their exercise and the exploration of their powers.

Bain explains the further development of this spontaneous energy by means of what Rylance calls a ‘conflictual’ model, one that has striking parallels with Nietzsche’s way of thinking about will to power. Bain’s underlying conception is that intelligence, will, and the other higher faculties are born from, and find their principle of growth and change in, turbulent difficulty. They grow by materially dialectical . . . activity . . . He frequently uses images, metaphors, and illustrations drawn from combat and battle, the invasions of destroying Vandals, the training of violent animals, the struggles of the entrepreneur, or the deeds of the fanatic or Irish terrorist . . . (197)

­26    Spirit Becomes Matter 23. Freud’s thought is clearly the inheritor of psycho-hydraulic notions of this type. 24. Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 309. 25. Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, pp. 153, 5. 26. Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 158. Shuttleworth cites Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, 2 vols (London: 1859–60), vol. 2, p. 58. The systematic paradigm of energy dynamics that Shuttleworth articulates, and which Nietzsche encapsulated in the concept of will to power, is implicit within more traditional ways of speaking of Eliot and of the Victorians generally – for example in Kathleen Blake’s notion of an exigent ‘shaping energy’ that demands expression. Blake writes that Middlemarch ‘offers one of the most searching of literary investigations of the Victorian work ethic, for it shows that not to shape the world is to remain shapeless oneself, which for natures conscious of shaping energy means painful consciousness of their own dispersal’. Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983), p. 35. 27. George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 90. 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), p. 45. Neither would the British psycho-physiologists have been shocked by Nietzsche’s further speculations about a will to power at the level of protoplasm, which Moore suggests Nietzsche borrowed from Sir Michael Foster’s 1877 book A Textbook of Physiology, of which Nietzsche owned a translation. And Bain in his 1872 Mind and Body (New York: D. Appleton and Company) noted the influence on one of his own intellectual forebears, the eighteenth-century associationist Joseph Priestley, of the physics of Ruggiero Boscovich, which had generalised the doctrine of force to all of matter. For Boscovich – who subsequently influenced Nietzsche (in Beyond Good and Evil he ranks Boscovich on a level with Copernicus) – matter was not an inert, utterly passive substance but, rather, as Bain says, ‘nothing else than an aggregate of centres of force, of points of attraction and repulsion, one towards the other’ (188). Bain accepts Boscovich’s conception as the distinctively modern, scientifically based doctrine of materialism; he also praises German materialism after 1854 for having surpassed Priestley ‘in the cogency of their arguments for the essential and inherent activity of matter; all known force being embodied in matter’ (188–95). Bain’s remarks here show the unfairness of Nietzsche’s complaint in the Genealogy of Morals (1887) that British theorists explained the naturalistic basis of human psychology in terms of something ‘purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular and thoroughly stupid’, such as the ‘blind and mechanistic hooking-together of ideas’ of associationist psychology, rather than in terms of some active, spontaneous, yet strictly naturalistic principle (Part I, section 1). This criticism applies to classical associationism, but not to the neo-associationism of thinkers like Bain. 29. Nietzsche often describes the will to power as the impulse to dominance or

Introduction    27 appropriation, but underlying this characterisation is the more fundamental one that I have been emphasising, the need for discharge of a psychophysiological quantum of energy. Ulysses’ quest for new horizons is an expression of will to power in the latter sense. 30. I have discussed the intricacies of Nietzsche’s doctrine in Nietzsche’s Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) and elsewhere. See especially ‘A Critique of Will to Power’ in the Blackwell Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Basil Blackwell, 2005). 31. Crimsworth’s understanding of raw power relations among individuals is exemplified in his account of how he gained the upper hand over Zoraïde Reuter, his employer at the girls’ school: ‘Her manner towards me had been altered ever since I had begun to treat her with hardness and indifference; she almost cringed to me on every occasion.’ But, Crimsworth continues, ‘Servility creates despotism. This slavish homage, instead of softening my heart, only pampered whatever was stern and exacting in its mood. The very circumstance of her hovering round me like a fascinated bird seemed to transform me into a rigid pillar of stone; her flatteries irritated my scorn . . .’ Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, ed. Heather Glen (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 157. 32. Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, p. 138. Shuttleworth provides a rich, socially contextualised account of power relations in this novel, foregrounding the discourses of gender regulation, and the relation between these discourses and the prevailing regime of social dominance. See also the extensive reading of The Professor in terms of power relations in John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 78–89, 96–8. 33. Kucich comes at this phenomenon from a very different standpoint than mine, but I can agree with his observation that ‘the enlarged selfhood’ produced by Victorian interior self-discipline becomes ‘the sign of an endlessness of inward force’ and ‘a weapon of class warfare’ (Repression in Victorian Fiction, p. 90). The Victorian ‘introversion of self-negation . . . even when it becomes the basis for George Eliot’s “wider sympathy” . . . cannot help returning to the uncontrolled and unconscious struggles for power rampant in any society that tries to separate individual experience from social experience’ (32). Here ‘repression’ functions very much like ascetic will to power. Kucich, however, sees Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot as well, as entirely aligned with their fictional characters’ attempt to make their interior lives independent of the social outside; whereas I discern in Middlemarch and Jane Eyre, at least, naturalistic, and implicitly critical, investigations of the moral ideology of Victorian culture that is the constitutive condition of any such attempt. It should be noted that Kucich has subsequently expressed ‘second thoughts’ about what he now describes as an ‘idealized form of social collectivity’ that he endorsed in Repression in Victorian Fiction. John Kucich, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 30. 34. Nietzsche’s Remark 113 of Daybreak addresses the kind of pleasure described here by Brontë:

­28    Spirit Becomes Matter The striving for distinction keeps a constant eye on the next man and wants to know what his feelings are . . . We want . . . to perceive or divine how the next man outwardly or inwardly suffers from us, how he loses control over himself and surrenders to the impressions our hand or even merely the sight of us makes upon him . . . inasmuch as he has impressed himself on the soul of the other, changed its shape and ruled over it at his own sweet will. 35. Heather Glen, Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 65–82. 36. Glen describes the evangelicalism of Brontë’s time as ‘a world-denying theology, distinguished by its emphasis on the need for redemption, and on original sin. The evangelical Christian was not at home in this world, and was not expected to look for temporal happiness. The only lasting joys were heavenly joys, and the main purpose of the Christian’s sojourn in this world was to prepare for death’ (69, n. 13). But this characterisation could apply equally to severe Pauline-Augustinian Christianity of any period. Hence, for example, the presence, frequently remarked by critics, of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in the background of Jane Eyre. The functions of pedagogical surveillance in Brontë’s time that Glen describes are modalisations of an inquisitorial and self-inquisitorial tendency that has periodically recurred in the history of Christianity, and that produced such an institution as the medieval confessional. Glen’s important observations regarding evangelical pedagogy should be seen against this larger historical background, for example as it was limned by Foucault’s investigation of the discipline of the soul in early Christianity in the unfinished fourth volume of The History of Sexuality – an investigation itself distally inspired by Nietzsche’s Genealogy. 37. The notion of ideological ‘intoning’ at the pre-verbal level is derived from V. I. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 87. 38. So according to Barbara Bodichon, in a letter to Bessie Rain Parks quoted by Gillian Beer in George Eliot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 181–2. 39. F. W. H. Myers, ‘George Eliot’, in Essays: Modern (London: Macmillan, 1921), p. 269. 40. According to Kant, ‘It is not to be understood that the assumption of the existence of God is necessary as a ground of all obligation in general (for this rests . . . solely on the autonomy of reason itself)’; ‘The moral law is the sole determining ground of the pure will.’ Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), pp. 130, 113. There is, of course, a crucial difference from Kant in Eliot’s conception of pity or sympathy as the essential moral motive. For Kant, the motive must be pure respect for the law, not any kind of affect or ‘pathology’, and pity or sympathy are ‘pathological’ in Kant’s sense of the term. 41. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, sec. 5, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge:

Introduction    29 Cambridge University Press, 2005). Gertrude Himmelfarb saw this separation, and its accompanying intensification of moral fervour, as the next step in the progression from Catholicism to Protestantism, and cites Eliot’s own testimony that she owed to evangelicalism the ‘idea of duty’ as ‘something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of the self’. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and of Ideologies in Transition (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), p. 291. 42. Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 43. George Eliot, Romola, ed. Andrew Sanders (London: Penguin Books, 1980), p. 674. 44. Ibid. pp. 664–5. 45. Cf. William Myers’ critique of Eliot’s novels on the basis of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. William Myers, The Teaching of George Eliot (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984), pp. 119–32. In a later passage (183), Myers comments that ‘in spite of Nietzsche’s contemptuous dismissal of altruism as utilitarian we are faced with the possibility that the most intensely altruistic and ascetic of George Eliot’s characters are also the most Nietzschean’, but then develops this insight in a way that has nothing in common with my approach. 46. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Riverside, 1956), ch. 3, p. 21. All citations are from this edition. 47. Suzy Anger, Victorian Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 113. Anger is replying to, among others, Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), and Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sentimentalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 48. George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Such awareness is, in fact, only to be expected in such a deeply Christian thinker as Eliot. The recognition that, as Anger says, ‘it is not always easy to distinguish between selflessness and selfaffirmation’ (Victorian Interpretation, p. 123) is intrinsic to Christian ethical reflection; but Eliot’s physio-psychological investigations cannot be adequately grasped in these terms. 49. The best demonstration of the sophistication of Eliot’s conception of sympathy is from a book that is not concerned to intervene in the sympathy debate at all, but to explain how Eliot’s concept of subjectivity as a whole developed out of her engagement with the new materialist psychology, Michael Davis’s superbly nuanced, and well-informed, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2006). Davis defends Eliot’s brand of moral psychology from the traditional humanistic standpoint, but he shows how deeply grounded it is in what she had learned from Lewes, Bain and the others about the ways in which ethical motive is shaped by the dynamics of nerve energy, on the one hand, and the influence of the social environment, on the other. 50. For a recent discussion of the relation between Eliot-scriptor and her narrators, see K. M. Newton, Modernizing George Eliot: The Writer as Artist, Intellectual, Proto-Modernist, Cultural Critic (New York: Bloomsbury

­30    Spirit Becomes Matter Academic, 2011), pp. 60–8. Newton’s approach and mine have nothing in common. 51. Henry Staten, ‘Is Middlemarch Ahistorical?’, PMLA 115.5 (October 2000): 991–1,005. 52. The extreme nature of Emily Brontë’s naturalism has been widely felt in the past, and explained in different ways, usually in relation to Darwin; but Barbara Munson Goff has made the intriguing suggestion that Brontë knew a lot about ‘the history and practice of sheepbreeding in Yorkshire’, and that Wuthering Heights is ‘a hypothetical experiment in the breeding of human beings, conducted to suggest how the breed has been corrupted from its “native state” by . . . civilization’. ‘Between Natural Theology and Natural Selection: Breeding the Human Animal in Wuthering Heights’, Victorian Studies 27.4 (Summer 1984): 477–508. 53. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. David Daiches (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 120–1. 54. On Emily’s own feelings with respect to death, see the fascinating account in the final chapter of Winifred Gerin, Emily Brontë: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

Chapter 1

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)

The crucial unresolved question of Jane Eyre criticism concerns the relation between its romantic plot, which tells the story of one woman’s triumphant struggle against oppressive forces of religiously based convention, and its religious plot, the narrative of the ‘pilgrim’s progress’ of that same woman back toward (some sort of) Christian faith. The central narrative drive of the novel, the one that has over the years impressed most readers, is clearly that of Jane’s fight for personal freedom and autonomy, be it only that of ‘bourgeois individualism’; the subtler religious plot is woven into events that appear secondary from the standpoint of the romantic reading, and into a pervasive texture of allusions to biblical language that only a reader intimately familiar with this language can perceive. It is thus not surprising that so much Jane Eyre criticism simply ignores the religious plot. Nevertheless, a substantial, and growing, body of work supports the view that the religious plot is not only important in the novel, but dominant. What we think is fundamentally at stake in this novel depends on how we answer the question of the relation between its two plots. If Jane’s ultimate concern is to be defined in terms of orthodox Christianity, or of some wider, ‘spiritual’ standpoint, perhaps one that, as Jeffrey Franklin says, ‘includes’ and ‘supersedes’ Christianity, then Jane Eyre is a pious or inspirational work, not a strictly secular one, and does not participate, as probably the majority of readers over the past century have believed, in the intellectual adventure of the modern secular intellect.1 The very proliferation of religious readings of Jane Eyre has, however, muddied the view of what is at stake, because these readings have such varying notions of what counts as Christianity. Some, which invoke the classical statements of Christian doctrine by St Paul, Bunyan and others as a standard by which to measure Jane’s faith, argue that, despite the dominance of the religious plot, Jane’s religion falls short of orthodoxy. This reading, as penetratingly developed by Peter Allan Dale, leaves

­32    Spirit Becomes Matter us with a profoundly evasive Jane Eyre, one that strongly implies the conversion of Jane to orthodox belief but leaves it shrouded in ambiguity, making the relation between its two plots undecidable.2 Other readers, with a more liberal, but still professedly Christian, standpoint, celebrate Jane’s humane and forward-looking revisions of orthodoxy as developments of authentic Christianity. For these readers, of whom Jerome Beaty is the most prominent, Christianity is so open to innovation that it is able to absorb into itself Jane’s romantic, individualist, independence-seeking drive.3 Still others, such as Franklin, who adopt an even more ‘liberal’ standpoint, argue that Jane remains deeply religious throughout, but do not find it of crucial importance whether her religion is orthodox or not. The more the lines of orthodoxy are blurred by the interpreter, the more reconcilable the romantic and the religious plots seem, for it begins to look as though one can be a romantic rebel who opts for fulfilment in this world and still be an obedient child of the Christian God, who might even be thought of as female.4 For a reader like Dale, however, who draws a sharp distinction between the inside and the outside of the Christian fold, one plot ought to subsume the other, because they are not reconcilable. There is general agreement among the various parties to this debate that the crucial doctrinal issue in Jane Eyre concerns the relation between love of the creature and love of the creator, a question that is known to have tormented Charlotte Brontë personally, and which Jane herself addresses at one point in the novel. Is the nature of Jane’s love for Rochester at the end of the novel compatible with the orthodox requirement, originally stated by St Paul, and never rejected up to Brontë’s time by anything that could be called orthodox Christianity, that love of the creature must be subordinated to love of the creator? On a strict construction of this doctrine, it involves an extremely guarded view of marital love, which is thought to be perilous to the believer’s soul, and Jane is convicted of succumbing to this peril. By contrast, for the more liberal interpreters, who also invoke the classical standard, but throw it into a softer focus, Jane shows just what a good Christian she is by being able to love her husband so warmly without detriment to her love of God.5 Whether Jane is judged to be inside or outside the circle of orthodoxy, thus, the doctrinal question in Jane Eyre turns on this issue and no other, and the inquiry into the relation of its two plots needs accordingly to be focused on it. Does Jane, or does Jane not, violate some essential boundary of Christian orthodoxy, a boundary recognised as essential within, and by, the novel, in the way that she loves Rochester? Any answer one might give to this question has limited significance

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    33

as long as it does not grapple with the meaning for Christianity, and thus for any attempt to push beyond Christianity, of the boundary of orthodoxy itself – as long, that is, as we have not grasped this boundary in terms of Nietzsche’s question, ‘What is the value of this world?’ Christianity calls the value of this world into question in the most essential way when it proposes that mortal creatures, merely because they are mortal, do not deserve to be the ultimate objects of love. Because they have not sufficiently interrogated the meaning of this boundary that Christianity sets to mortal love, all sides in the debate have thus far underestimated the degree and intensity of revisionary force of Jane’s encounter in Jane Eyre with Christian doctrine and its preacher. Jane, with Brontë behind her, is more deeply inside Christianity than the liberal interpreters (who feel more comfortable with her heterodoxy than she does) have seen; but she is at the same time also more outside it, in the sense that she chooses her own path precisely in the form of a conscious rejection of the boundary that orthodoxy sets to earthly love, with full awareness of the heaven-and-hell-shaking consequences of that rejection. The conservative interpreters have come much closer to the mark, because the fact that Jane never stops believing in spirits and super-nature of some inconclusive sort has never obscured for them, as it has for the liberal-religious view, the depth and intractability of the conflict between the novel’s romantic and religious plots, and they have challenged criticism to account for this conflict. But the conflict is deeper than even these interpreters have seen, because it is inseparably bound up with a turn toward the non-moral analysis of moral psychology, and in particular the psychology of forgiveness.

Vengeance as an Ethical Principle Early in the novel Jane proposes a principle of ethical vengeance, vengeance that restores the equilibrium of justice, and opposes it to the doctrine of Christian forgiveness that Helen Burns upholds. Then, in the great scenes of crisis between Jane and St John in which the novel reaches its intellectual and dramatic apogee, vengeance is shown to be the hidden truth of St John’s forgiveness of Jane – precisely as in Nietzsche’s account three decades later of the logic of ressentiment behind the Christian ethos. In between these two moments, the novel works through a complex exploration of the psychology of domination, an exploration that links aggression and forgiveness via the problematic of the gift. Forgiveness is in its essence a free gift, the freest of all gifts; as

­34    Spirit Becomes Matter Vladimir Jankélévitch notes, the meaning of forgiveness is very closely bound up with that of grace, the free gift of mercy that God, beyond the strict dictates of justice, bestows on human beings through no merit of their own.6 The concept of forgiveness was thus well rendered by the translators of the Vulgate, who translated the Greek aphiemi, which in its root sense means ‘to send away’, as per-donare, ‘to give thoroughly or completely’. This sense was strictly preserved by the English translation of the Latin as for-give, which has the same literal meaning as perdonare. God freely bestows release from the penalty of damnation; and each Christian is called on to bestow forgiveness upon her trespassers in the same way.7 Early in Jane Eyre, however, Jane, who, like the good little pagan that she is at this point, seems never to have heard of Christian forgiveness, defends the right to vengeance as a fundamental principle of justice. The notion of ethical vengeance violates the imperative of forgiveness, and is thus unavowable under the aegis of Christian moral ideology. Brontë introduces it casually, as the immature view of a mistreated orphan, and the reader is free to conclude that during the course of the story Jane outgrows this way of thinking. But is this really what happens? The question of vengeance is initially posed as a problem in the first major crisis of the novel, when the long-oppressed child turns with verbal violence against her aunt. Mrs Reed has just commissioned the Revd Brocklehurst to remove Jane to the Lowood School, warning him that Jane’s ‘worst fault’ is her tendency to deceit. The ten-year-old Jane is devastated by the imputation; when Brocklehurst leaves she confronts her aunt for the first time, and in this confrontation it is the little girl’s spirit that proves the more powerful: ‘I am not deceitful: if I were, I would say I loved you . . .   ‘I am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again as long as I live . . . and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty . . . People think you are a good woman, but you are bad; hard-hearted. You are deceitful!’8

Jane is completely victorious: Mrs Reed, in response, ‘looked frightened; her work had slipped from her knee; she was . . . rocking to and fro, and even twisting her face as if she would cry’. Jane feels exultant, ‘with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph’ that she has ever felt. But when she is once more alone in the nursery her feeling of triumph rapidly subsides: a ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused and menaced Mrs Reed; the same ridge,

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    35 black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as meetly my subsequent condition, when half an hour’s silence and reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct, and the dreariness of the hated and hating position.   Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned. (48–9)

This unhappy sequel to her vengeful pleasure does not, however, convince Jane that vengeance is a bad thing; on the contrary, by the time she is installed at the Lowood School, she has developed an ethic of vengeance, which she passionately articulates in discussion with her friend Helen Burns. Helen has been flogged by Miss Scratcherd earlier in the day, and when Helen speaks respectfully of the teacher, Jane’s bravado erupts once more: ‘. . . if I were in your place I should dislike her; I should resist her; if she struck me with that rod, I should get it from her hand; I should break it under her nose’ (65). Helen in response tells Jane that ‘the Bible bids us return good for evil’; but this does not put the question to rest for Jane, who shortly thereafter returns to the attack, providing this ethical rationale for vengeance: ‘If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way; they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should – so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.’ (67)

To this stirring declaration, abject, doomed young Helen, who at first sight looks like the spitting image of Nietzsche’s powerless slave moralist, invokes in reply, once again, the Christian ethic of forgiveness: ‘Heathens and savage tribes hold that doctrine, but Christians and civilised nations disown it.’ Twice, then, Jane defends the principle of ethical vengeance, and twice Helen reminds her that this principle violates the fundamental principle of Christian morality. The second time, Helen explicitly invokes its resonances for political ideology, identifying the distinction between vengeance and forgiveness as that between savagery and civilisation. To be civilised is to be Christian, and therefore to forgive; paganism, non-Christianity, believes in vengeance, and is therefore, by definition, savagery, absence of civilisation.9 Helen then tells Jane to follow Christ’s injunction to ‘Love your enemies’, at which Jane boggles, declaring that it is impossible for her to love Mrs Reed; and Helen, struck by Jane’s fervour, responds with a long speech in which she explains that

­36    Spirit Becomes Matter forgiveness is rendered both desirable and possible for her by her belief that this life will soon end, giving way to eternal glory: ‘What a singularly deep impression [your aunt’s] injustice seems to have made on your heart! No ill usage so brands its record on my feelings. Would you not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited? Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs. We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this world: but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies . . . and only the spark of spirit will remain . . . pure as when it left the Creator . . . whence it came, it will return . . . I live in calm, looking to the end.’ (68)

The bad feeling Helen wants Jane to get rid of is precisely what Nietzsche calls ressentiment, the condition of ‘being unable to be done with injuries’ (Ecce Homo).10 By holding out the prospect of a reward in another world, the ascetic priest teaches the powerless, whom Nietzsche calls ‘slaves’, to reinterpret this churning ressentiment as love and forgiveness; in this way the actual world, along with the physical body and its drives, is imaginatively or spiritually devalued. Helen, however, argues the contrary – that the thought of eternal life renders this life ‘too short’ for vengeful feeling, and that ressentiment is characteristic not of Christians, but of ‘heathens’. What role does Helen’s interesting theory, and the theology associated with it, play in the overall architecture of Jane Eyre? Helen’s speech on forgiveness explicitly proposes Christian doctrines to Jane as articles of belief, and this appears to spur Jane’s journey to faith; Helen thus opens the doctrinal problematic that St John more fully unfolds, and which the book must somehow work through. But are Helen and St John on the same doctrinal wavelength, or does Helen, as is often said, represent a more attractive, more humane version of Christianity, one that we are supposed to understand in contrast with St John’s version? And, in the latter case, does Jane reject St John’s brand of Christianity while embracing another brand, more in the spirit of Helen’s? There is only one important doctrinal difference between Helen and St John, but this single difference contrasts so sharply with St John’s fire-and-brimstone version of Christianity that to the modern reader it might appear decisive: as opposed to St John’s Calvinistic vision of the End, Helen believes in the salvation of all souls. Every human soul, not just an elite crew of the justified, must return ‘pure as when it left the Creator’ back ‘whence it came’; ‘with this creed’, she avers, ‘I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime . . . [that] revenge never worries my heart’ (68). As Jane’s struggle with Christian belief plays itself out in the novel,

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    37

however, whether everyone goes to heaven, as in Helen’s heterodox belief, or only the Chosen do, as in St John’s more orthodox view, is insignificant. The essential question for Jane Eyre and for Jane Eyre is whether there is a glorious life after this one at all. Helen and St John are at one in their conviction that such a life does in fact exist, and that they will have it soon, and for both of them the crucial doctrine that one must not immoderately love mortal beings follows from this conviction. Helen, thus, is the one who first accuses Jane of being overly attached to other people, as St John will be the one who obliges Jane to make a definitive choice between earthly and heavenly love: ‘. . . you think too much of the love of human beings [Helen tells Jane] . . . The sovereign hand that created your frame . . . has provided you with other resources . . . than creatures feeble as you . . . God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness – to glory?’ (78–9)

For the classic enunciators of Christian doctrine, the ecstasy of loving God would not be enough by itself to tip the scales against human loves, if this ecstasy were doomed to end with the death and decay of the mortal body; only the promise that we can dwell in the presence of God forever can do this. Thus St Paul with staggering honesty says, in perhaps the most often repeated words of the New Testament, that if the dead rise not, and eternal death is all that awaits us, we might as well devote ourselves to eating, drinking and being merry. But, Paul believes, death is not, in fact, the end. On this presumed fact is based the injunction to moderate all earthly attachments; and on this fundamental article of faith there is no difference between Helen and St John.

Forgiveness and the Other World Helen makes clear, and St John and the tradition of Christian orthodoxy confirm, that the doctrine of the subordination of earthly loves, like that of forgiveness, rests on the belief in the imminence of another, eternal life beyond this one. These three teachings – eternal life, forgiveness and erotic moderation – form a tightly cohering doctrinal pyramid, of which the base is the belief in eternal life. Without this belief, the other two doctrines lose their point. Thus, underlying the question of Jane’s stance on love of creatures is the more fundamental question ‘Does Jane believe in eternal life?’; and almost everything in the novel implies that she does not. She does not deny that it exists, but here is how she describes

­38    Spirit Becomes Matter her thoughts when as a young girl she looked at the spring night and thought about the dying girls at the Lowood School: . . . This world is pleasant – it would be dreary to be called from it, and to have to go who knows where?   And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell: and for the first time it recoiled, baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all round an unfathomed gulf: it felt for the one point where it stood – the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth: and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos. (87)

Jane does not say that she rejected the concept of hell, as many critics of Christianity have done who find it monstrous and unjust; she indicates that she is baffled by it, and that she is equally baffled by its more appealing companion concept, heaven. It isn’t – as it so often is, with those who reject Christianity – the part she doesn’t like about the Christian metaphysics, the idea of hell, that her mind won’t buy into, it’s the whole metaphysics. These concepts have been ‘infused into’ her mind, she says, by some external agency; but when she tries to ‘comprehend’ this ideological implantation her mind recoils. As against these notions, which are present in her mind, but which have failed to take root, she feels the immediate certainty that ‘this world is pleasant’ right here and now (even for someone in her circumstances!); all else is ‘formless cloud and vacant depth’. This remarkably strong conclusion at which the young Jane’s thoughts arrive, which comes as close to declaring a lack of belief in the other world as possible without quite doing so, is never directly corrected or qualified by the mature, narrating Jane who so eloquently articulates it. Such passionately expressed doubt about the most fundamental element of Christian faith – the belief in another life – cries out for definitive, explicit retraction by the mature narrator, if the reader is to conclude that she has indeed retracted it; at most, however, there are a few ambiguous shreds of possible evidence tending in this direction.11 But if Jane does not believe in eternal life, she has no religious reason to either moderate her love for Rochester, or to forgive. There are other reasons, prudential, emotional or ethico-political, for doing either or both of these things; but when such reasons are in play the value of forgiving, or of moderating one’s loves, can no longer be deduced from doctrinal considerations. And in that case, both their value and the grounds of their value can be sceptically, empirically, investigated, as Charlotte Brontë in fact goes on to investigate them in this novel. She shows us in minute detail how these doctrines operate in specific situations involving specific persons involved in power struggles with each other.12

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    39

The moral psychology of the believer is, so to speak, programmed to operate with the concepts provided by moral ideology, and these concepts subserve what Foucault would call relations of domination and submission, and Nietzsche calls exercises of will to power. That Christian doctrine is an ideological instrument of domination is first made evident in Jane Eyre through the figure of Brocklehurst. Brontë then casts a glaring light on this social function of Christian moral ideology by making Helen, the most abject and submissive character in the book, enunciate the doctrine of forgiveness as a rationale for social submissiveness. The theme of Jane’s oppression by religio-moral ideology is then cast into the background during her time with Rochester, but re-emerges with St John, in such a way as to close the ideological circle that opens with Helen: forgiveness operates in the subjugated subject (Helen) as an ideological prop for submission, in the subjugating subject (St John) as an ideological prop for subjugation. The power of the moral-ideological machinery that Brontë/Jane is up against should not be underestimated; by no means do I say that it can be reduced to pure social ideology. As Nietzsche and Foucault well understood, the doctrines of Christianity constitute a discipline of the self that, independently of the social power-effects that might be wrung from them at the level of moral ideology, produces specific kinds of power at the level of self-relation. Christian doctrine could not function as moral ideology if it were not rooted in this deeper, psycho-ethical power.13 Brontë, who had to struggle her whole life with the doctrinal articulation of her own inner economy, has a deep insight into how all this works, and this insight guides her fictionalised inquiry, which has a quite clear, almost systematic, shape that I will outline in what follows.

The Axiom of Purity and the Poisoned Gift The meta-doctrine that regulates the functioning of all the formal doctrines of Christianity could be called the Axiom of Purity. According to this axiom, Christian ideals are so inherently pure that even when they are perverted in the psychic machinery of the sinner the principles themselves remain uncontaminated, and continue to operate. By continuing to believe in the purity of the principles – despite seeing time and again that those who proclaim themselves believers are hypocrites and worse – and to organise her moral deliberations in their terms, the sinner can hope eventually, though perhaps only in the next world, to purify the sinful machinery itself. The consequence of this is that the sinner, no

­40    Spirit Becomes Matter matter how sinful, who has installed the Christian principles within her psychic machinery (that is, who ‘believes in them’) is eo ipso already better than herself, and certainly better than the heathen who might actually behave better but who has not performed this installation. The believing Christian (even one who behaves badly) has already risen above nature, in which the heathen remains sunk (even if her behaviour is virtuous). What makes this entire conceptual structure possible are the concepts of grace and forgiveness – the concepts of pure gift. Only because God’s grace is absolutely free can the sinner be as sinful as sin, and yet bear within herself the purifying incorruptible principles of Christian doctrine in all their intrinsic efficacy, beginning with the fundamental ethical rule of forgiveness. Christian forgiveness is, in principle, the purest mirror of the gift-giving grace of God, and thus the very essence of gift, in the profoundest sense of the term. And yet, how can the sinner in all her sinfulness, prior to having undergone the full process of purification, mirror the gift-giving power of God? Here is where the Axiom of Purity comes in. Even if the forgiveness that I proffer fails to be a pure, fully free gift, even if it is contaminated as an empirical act by the corruption of my motives, nevertheless, qua forgiveness, as forsaking of vengeance, or at least as the conscious attempt to forsake vengeance, as the mere aim at imitation of Christ, it already manifests the working of the purifying spirit that is intrinsic to the Christian teaching. It is this ideal functioning of the Axiom of Purity that Brontë-scriptor brings into question in Jane Eyre. Even forgiveness as purified by Christian discipline of the most rigorous kind, as it is in the case of St John, is in the end, for Brontë’s physio-psychological analysis, shadowed by empiricity in a way that for Jane Christian doctrine cannot explain away. Brontë’s depiction of St John shows how forgiveness of the most rigorously self-denying, otherworldly type can be poisoned by the aggressive affects when they are turned inward by ascetic psychology, to re-emerge in the guise of gift-giving. The remainder of this chapter lays out the logic of Brontë’s analysis of forgiveness as poisoned gift and as perverted channel for will to power. This analysis unfolds across three interlocked scenes of gift-giving, each involving two actors. In the first, Jane is the gift-giver and would-be dominator; in the second and third, she is the gift-receiver who must resist domination. In the first and third scenes, what is involved is the sublime gift of forgiveness, in the second scene, ordinary material gifts. The second scene makes explicit the fact that gifts can be used as an instrument of domination (in a way that is relatively innocuous, by comparison with the gift of forgiveness); hence, the second scene mediates

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    41

between the first and third scenes of gift-giving, making explicit what remains implicit (though plainly visible) in them. 1

2 3

Mediating scene Second scene of First scene of forgiveness forgiveness Dominator: Jane

Rochester

St John

Dominated: Mrs Reed

Jane

Jane

The First and Second Scenes of Gift-Giving After her conversation with Helen on the topic of vengeance, Jane does not speak of it again; and years later, as a grown woman, she returns to the site of her original act of vengeance against Mrs Reed and attempts to erase it, apparently as a long-delayed result of Helen’s counsel, by giving Mrs Reed the gift of her forgiveness. This scene, which on the level of plot seems to be of secondary significance, an interruption in the development of her relation with Rochester, is crucial for both the intellectual and the aesthetic architecture of the novel, because it begins to question the nature of the psychological economy of forgiveness in a way that will come home to roost with St John. An eye for an eye: that is the law of vengeance. This vengeful exchange is the negative image of commercial exchange (instead of a good for a good, an ill for an ill) but, unlike pure, lawless vengefulness, it operates according to the same principle of reciprocation of equivalences, right down to the tendency of the parties to the exchange to seek to extract a (positive or negative) surplus from the exchange, over and above strict equivalence. Forgiveness, by contrast, would operate according to the economy of the gift, it being of the very essence of Christian forgiveness that it flows forth absolutely freely; in return for an ill, the free gift of love. True forgiveness, if such a thing could exist – forgiveness that was not a ruse of will to power or a pragmatic expedient – would be the truest gift, one that imposes no obligation on the receiver and does not inscribe her against her will in a cycle of reciprocity.14 It would thus stop the circuit of exchange in its tracks, putting an end to the cycle that vengeance would escalate. It is as just such a gift that Jane proffers her forgiveness to the dying Mrs Reed. The occasion of the first scene of forgiveness is Jane’s return to the Reed home at the request of her dying aunt. They have not seen each

­42    Spirit Becomes Matter other since the day she was packed off to the school for orphans; and Jane comes full of compassion for Mrs Reed and prepared for reconciliation: ‘I came back to her now with no other emotion than a sort of ruth for her great sufferings, and a strong yearning to forget and forgive all injuries – to be reconciled and clasp hands in amity’ (230). Jane asserts the perfect purity of her motive: she felt no other emotion than ruth and yearning to forgive. This purity, however, does not survive the first moment of contact with the reality of the other woman. Mrs Reed is unchanged; she hates Jane as much as ever, rejecting the touch of Jane’s hand and turning an icy eye on her, and Jane’s ruth instantly metamorphoses into rage and the desire to dominate. The critical moral psychologist lingers attentively, and with relish, over the honesty of Jane’s avowal of what she then felt: ‘I felt pain, and then I felt ire; and then I felt a determination to subdue her – to be her mistress in spite of both her nature and her will’ (231). The desire to overpower another’s being can scarcely be stated in stronger terms than these. More important for my analysis than the intensity of Jane’s will to dominate her aunt, however, is its modality. It takes the form of the desire to impose the purest, most spiritual of gifts, the gift of forgiveness, on the unwilling recipient. Mrs Reed lapses into unconsciousness and Jane does not see her again for some days, then a second interview takes place. When Mrs Reed confesses that she has for years concealed from Jane the existence of an uncle who had wished to adopt her, Jane, remarkably, evinces no reaction whatever to the staggering revelation. Instead, she returns to the loving attack. But how can her aunt’s revelation make no impression on her? More pressingly, what has happened to her ‘ire’ and her ‘determination to subdue’ her aunt? The text seems to have entirely forgotten it; Jane’s words and actions now proceed as though the purity of her ruth and yearning to forgive had never been interrupted. She invites her aunt to reciprocate the forgiveness she now offers her, with words that appear directly to repudiate the principle of ethical vengeance that she had once articulated to Helen Burns: ‘Dear Mrs Reed . . . think no more of this, let it pass away from your mind. Forgive me for my passionate language: I was a child then; eight, nine years have passed since that day.’ Now it is her aunt who stands by the necessity, if not the righteousness, of vengeance: ‘I tell you I could not forget it; and I took my revenge: for you to be adopted by your uncle, and placed in a state of ease and comfort was what I could not endure.’ But this new Jane, who cannot be roused to ire, replies: ‘“My disposition is not so bad as you think: I am passionate, but not vindictive . . . and I long earnestly to be reconciled to you now. Kiss me, aunt” . . . I approached my cheek

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    43

to her lips: she would not touch it. She said I oppressed her by leaning over the bed.’ Jane then supports her as she gives Mrs Reed a drink, and as she lays her back down, she covers Mrs Reed’s hand with her own, a gesture that Mrs Reed rejects as before. These, then, are the last words Jane speaks to her before Mrs Reed enters her final decline: ‘Love me, then, or hate me, as you will . . . you have my full and free forgiveness: ask now for God’s and be at peace.’ Seen in one perspective, this fascinating scene is a perfect expression of true Christian feeling. On the one hand, the self-declared enemy, the woman who has harmed Jane, who continues to hate her and will not forgive Jane’s transgression against her, and who refuses her proffer of reconciliation. On the other, Jane, who, overcoming her spontaneous tendency to ire, patiently suffers Mrs Reed’s hatred, holding forth the gift of her full and free forgiveness. Yet consider Mrs Reed’s powerlessness in the face of Jane’s generosity. She must lie there helplessly while Jane brings her own body close up against her, putting her cheek to the lips of this dying, immobilised woman who has just finished reaffirming her undiminished loathing of that very Jane who now, undeterred, presses her for a kiss. We do not have to guess how this affects Mrs Reed: ‘She said I oppressed her.’ And yet, immediately after this, Jane again tries to hold her hand. What is a gift, be it as pure as you like, that the receiver does not want yet is powerless to reject? What is it to insist with an irresistible power that a gift be received, and to insist in person, in the closest physical proximity to an immobilised recipient, reminding her that it is I, myself, whom she loathes with unabated loathing, who am giving it to her, and indeed that I give nothing but myself, a modification of my own spirit, and do so so fully and freely that, no matter how noxious she might find this gift of myself, I will continue to pour it forth toward her? (Jankélévitch: ‘the decision to forgive opposes the hyperbolic paradox of a total gift to the partitive gesture of giving, otherwise referred to as offering this or that.’ This is because the one who forgives sacrifices ‘not a part of his possessions but his being itself’; Forgiveness, p. 128.) Does the scriptorial consciousness that composed these lines believe without qualification in the purity of Jane’s impulse of forgiveness here, when a few paragraphs earlier she has put in Jane’s mouth the determination to subdue her aunt against her will and her nature? Brontë has left this scene tantalisingly undecidable; it is entirely possible that she was unable to decide it, having pushed into areas of moral psychology that she lacked the conceptual resources fully to articulate. One is free to think that the author-scriptor means us to believe that Jane has indeed overcome her earlier urge to dominate her aunt, arriving

­44    Spirit Becomes Matter at the ideal of Christian forgiveness with no discernible internal struggle, and without the narrator’s even having to mention it – as though Jane had imperceptibly become a good Christian, and forgiveness were now the most natural thing in the world for her. But, alternatively, one might think, and entirely without forcing the text, that it is by means of pushing her forgiveness upon the dying woman that Jane now indulges the desire to master her, to be her ‘mistress’. The second reading is consistent with the critical stance from which Brontë characteristically views power relations between individuals, in particular where one individual is forced by circumstances to be the recipient of another’s generosity – a situation that turns up repeatedly in Jane Eyre, mainly in the relation between Jane and Rochester. Just how jaundiced an eye Brontë turned on the gift may be gathered from the gift Hunsden makes Crimsworth of the portrait of Crimsworth’s mother, in The Professor. This portrait, which is delivered via messenger, is of inestimable value for Crimsworth; he lost his mother at an early age and has now been cast out into the world friendless and practically penniless. But Hunsden attaches a note to his gift that purposely and explicitly poisons it. Here is the note: ‘There is a sort of stupid pleasure in giving a child sweets, a fool his bells, a dog a bone. You are repaid by seeing the child besmear his face with sugar; by witnessing how the fool’s ecstasy makes a greater fool of him than ever; by watching the dog’s nature come out over his bone. In giving William Crimsworth his Mother’s picture, I give him sweets, bell and bone, all in one; what grieves me is, that I cannot behold the result . . .   ‘P.S. You said last night you positively declined adding another item to your account with me; don’t you think I’ve saved you the trouble?’15

Crimsworth’s response: My pleasure was now poisoned by pungent pain . . . If Hunsden had come in at that moment I should have said to him ‘I owe you nothing, Hunsden – not a fraction of a farthing – you have paid yourself in taunts.’ (236)

Hunsden poisons his gift out of an impulse of generosity, in order to draw the toxicity of indebtedness that would otherwise flow from it and leave Crimsworth more indebted than ever to him. The message is as toxic as it needs to be; nothing less toxic would suffice to make Crimsworth feel that his pre-existing debt to Hunsden has been erased. And yet Hunsden carries out the task of poisoning his gift with a sadistic glee that blends disturbingly with the generosity that at another level motivates it. Already in her first novel, thus, Charlotte Brontë had displayed a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the gift’s Chinesebox complexity.

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    45

By contrast, Jane Eyre’s account of how she forgave her aunt shows none of this understanding; but the design of the novel brings to bear the critical perspective that is missing from Jane’s own reflections. Shortly after the death of her aunt, in the time between her betrothal to Rochester and Jane’s discovery of his secret, Jane herself will be threatened by the overmastering gift-giving power of Rochester, and on the receiving end of the gift there is no mistaking its import. This period, which I have previously labelled the ‘mediating scene’ between the first and second scenes of forgiveness, has been thoroughly discussed by critics and requires minimal additional comment. Rochester showers Jane with jewels and silk dresses; intensely oppressed by his munificence, she longs for ‘ever so small an independency’ that would free her from this oppression and remarks, ‘I never can bear to be dressed like a doll by Mr Rochester, or sitting like a second Danaë with the golden shower falling daily round me.’ When Rochester then smiles at her, she compares his smile to that which a sultan would bestow on ‘a slave his gold and gems had enriched’ (267).16 This scene is an ironic transposition of Jane from dominating giftgiver in the scene with her aunt to dominated gift-receiver. Strikingly, the signifier ‘mistress’, which in the first scene of forgiveness signifies Jane’s position of power with respect to her aunt, in the scene of Rochester’s gift-giving signifies the position of abjection she is afraid she will occupy with respect to him. Is Brontë aware of this elegant chiasmus, or is this a mere verbal coincidence? In any case, if we doubt that Rochester’s gifts can offer any commentary on the one Jane had tried to impose on Mrs Reed, there will be a second drama of forgiveness, one that treats forgiveness – not, of course, Jankélévitch’s ideal forgiveness, but the empirical phenomenon, involving a particular case – explicitly as a gift that a man uses to dominate Jane.

Excursus on the Rochester–Jane Courtship The Rochester courtship for most readers and critics pushes the St John narrative into the background; yet in terms of both literary and intellectual quality it is far inferior to the latter. And in fact, Brontë’s bitter, belated preface to The Professor indicates that she injected the Gothic Rochester story into Jane Eyre under protest, as a concession to what she decries as the ‘highly wrought fancy’ of the publishers who rejected the sober realism of The Professor when she first attempted to publish it. Nevertheless, regardless of how much Brontë might have conceded to the popular taste in developing the Rochester story, she never lost sight

­46    Spirit Becomes Matter of the larger intellectual design and literary form of Jane Eyre into which the Rochester story is woven. Jane’s narrative as a whole, from the time she leaves Lowood to the end, is structured by a relation of chiastic symmetry between her struggle to break away from Rochester and her later struggle to break away from St John. These struggles motivate Brontë’s depiction of the action of will to power in gift-giving, on which I am primarily focusing; but the Rochester story also generates some tortuous motions of moral consciousness in Jane that are of first-rate interest for critical moral psychology. Whereas against St John Jane can slip into her natural role as a rebel against the symbolic order, her struggle with Rochester obligates her to act, rather awkwardly, as defender of the moral and divine law. Jane Eyre criticism has tended to accept Jane’s moralisings against Rochester at face value, but close examination shows that the language of moral ideology breaks down when Jane attempts to cast her own deliberations in its terms. The chiastic reversal to which I have just referred is sharply presented by Brontë in terms of the marriage question: she will live with Rochester only on condition that they marry, and she will live with St John only on condition that they do not marry. Thus, schematically:

Rochester

St John

Instruments of male domination:

passion

law

Instruments of Jane’s resistance:

law

passion

This chiasmus shows that, despite Jane’s frequent recourse to the language of principle, duty and piety, she actually treats this language instrumentally, adapting it to her needs of the moment, and fundamentally to her unbreakable will to self. But St John does the same; he uses the rhetoric of the Father’s word as an instrument of his attempt to appropriate Jane. The difference between Jane and the two men is that she is flexible in her instrumentalisation of language; she can deploy the language of morality and the resources of the symbolic order, or, alternatively, she can listen to the voice of passion, as needed, for the purpose of resisting the men’s will to dominate her. The central conflict is not, as moral ideology would have it, and as Jane nominally believes, between duty and inclination, reason and passion, nature and the word of God, but between the wills to power that opportunistically grasp either pole of these ideological structures as instruments to dominate or to resist domination. The ideological structures and the institutions they support are to some degree neutral in valence;

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    47

their meaning depends on how they are instrumentalised by the wills involved.17 Hence, in perhaps the most striking illustration of this principle, when Jane’s elevated new status as betrothed allows Rochester to encroach on her autonomy in a way that was formerly barred by the conventions of the contractual relation between master and servant, Jane conceives a way of re-establishing a strictly contractual boundary against his onslaught of gift-giving, suggesting to him the truly strange and original idea of continuing to work as his servant, and even to draw her wage, after they are married (268). The language of the accredited moral system breaks down most completely when Jane attempts to cast in its terms her response to Rochester’s desperate final plea. In Jane’s tumultuous state of mind, she finds ‘Conscience’ and ‘Reason’ speaking on the same side as their usual opponent, ‘Feeling’, in urging her to comply with his plea. ‘Oh, comply!’ [Feeling, seconded by Reason and Conscience] said. ‘Think of his misery; think of his danger – look at his state when left alone . . . – soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be hurt by what you do?’ (312)

According to the deranged language of this account, Jane feels that the selfless, and therefore moral, response at this moment – the one sanctioned by Reason and Conscience – is the same as what her passion for Rochester inclines her to do: give up her autonomy and become his mistress. The notion that it might be immoral to enter into an adulterous relationship with Rochester plays no role at all in her deliberation; the only potentially countervailing value of which she thinks is whether anyone ‘cares’ for her in such a way that they will be hurt by her degradation. But this very question brings her back to herself: ‘still indomitable was the reply’ to the temptation of Feeling, ‘– I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.’18 Thus, as against Feeling, Reason and Conscience, Jane aligns herself with the energetic upsurge of her will to self-assertion. It is purely and simply this that pulls her back from her near-acquiescence to Rochester’s demand. Yet, having once more activated the sources of her own will to power, Jane tries to translate this will into the language of submission to the law: I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad – as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? (312–13)

­48    Spirit Becomes Matter Jane is trying here to align the dynamics of her choice with the dualities of principle and propensity, law and desire – even though, as we have seen, this is not the basis on which her choice has actually been made. She has called herself back from the brink of a self-destructive choice by the recollection that she cares for herself. This caring she translates first into the notion that she respects herself, and then, once back on the terrain of familiar moral language, she brings in the heavy moral artillery of God’s laws and principles. But the reasoning of the passage is incoherent. It attempts to force the choice she has made into the familiar duality of principle and inclination, but ineptly casts the side of temptation as the choice of ‘convenience’. Moments before, feeling, reason and conscience were all clamouring for her to accept the slavelike servitude of becoming Rochester’s mistress, a choice that would in the end, as Jane’s deliberations have made clear, make her just one more of the ‘poor girls’ who have been ‘desecrated’ in Rochester’s memory; and this is what she now calls the choice of convenience. In this situation, in fact, there is no pleasure, no ‘convenience’, for Jane whichever way she goes; her options are to sacrifice her selfhood on the altar of her love, or the reverse. The irrelevance of the notion of convenience to the present situation shows that Jane’s language at this point is generated automatically by the language-machine of conventional morality; but we have already seen that what is really happening is, in good physiopsychological fashion, that a very strong desire has been vanquished by another, stronger one.19 Her desire to submit her being to Rochester’s will (with which were aligned feeling, reason and conscience) has been overcome by her stronger desire to remain her own woman. It is impossible to know how much control Brontë-scriptor exercises over the movements of Jane’s language at moments like these. Presumably she remains committed in principle to the language of moral ideology, yet remains driven by the passionate intuition of the absolute moral claim made by the individual organism’s need for the freedom to expend its own energy in its own way. So she must try to justify the latter in terms of the former, and this at times leads to an incoherence that manifests the limits of the scriptorial as well as those of the fictional or figural consciousness. (This is another instance of the incomplete articulation we encountered with respect to the first scene of forgiveness.)

Analysis of St John’s Nature The second scene of forgiveness, then, will reproduce the scene of Rochester’s gift-giving in a spiritual key, as St John attempts to

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    49

subjugate Jane with the gift of his forgiveness. That this gift is far more noxious than any proffered by Rochester is clear; what is far from clear is the meaning of this noxiousness. The apocalyptic, Calvinistic, ambitious St John seems too flawed a representative of Christianity to serve in the role of model Christian; thus, according to the Axiom of Purity, his perversion of the act of forgiveness should tell us nothing about Christian doctrine itself, only about him. Yet the novel, which ends with Jane’s passionate encomium of St John’s march toward heaven, does not endorse such a view. While she does not like his coldness to her, she never at any point criticises him for his coldness in relation to his mode of religious being. In the end, none of his character flaws, not even his use of forgiveness as a mask for his vengeance against her, indicate for Jane that he is any the less in accord with the Christian model of sainthood; nor does she doubt that his account of Christian doctrine is, on the crucial points, correct. A careful tracking of the progress of Jane’s agon with St John shows, then, that in the end, when she rejects St John the man she rejects as well the claim of orthodox Christianity for which he speaks. St John picks out Jane as someone he can use, and begins his campaign to appropriate her, from early in their acquaintance; but Jane does not begin to struggle against his domination until he demands that she become his wife. He presents his demand to her as though it emanated from the place of what Lacan calls the Name-of-the-Father – as though the symbolic order itself were commanding her. He tells her it is ‘heaven’s message’, which offers her ‘direct from God, a place in the ranks of His chosen’; when she heard this, Jane says, ‘The glen and sky spun round: the hills heaved! It was as if I had heard a summons from Heaven . . .’ (392). Yet she quickly perceives that this is really his own demand as an ordinary, real human male. When she realises this, she is back on familiar ‘imaginary’ ground and her own will becomes equal to his in power.20 She begins to feel that she could indeed go with him to India, even in the knowledge that she would probably not live long in that climate; but when she imagines in vivid detail what it would be like to marry him, to receive his endearments, and even to have sex with him (‘endure all the forms of love,’ as she puts it (395)) while knowing that he has no personal feeling for her, she concludes that she cannot bear to become his wife, for ‘such a martyrdom would be monstrous’. ‘As his sister, I might accompany him – not as his wife.’ St John, however, redoubles his assault; she cannot come with him without marrying him because all other ties are ‘too loose and uncertain’. ‘I want a wife: the sole helpmeet I can influence efficiently in life, and retain absolutely till death’ (396).

­50    Spirit Becomes Matter At this point Jane begins to crumble before his onslaught (‘I felt his influence in my marrow’), but St John pushes his metaphysical case a little too hard. ‘Do you think God will be satisfied with half an oblation? Will He accept a mutilated sacrifice? It is the cause of God I advocate: it is under His standard I enlist you. I cannot accept on His behalf a divided allegiance: it must be entire’ (396–7). St John’s gambit is so transparent that in an instant Jane regains the upper hand. ‘Oh, I will give my heart to God,’ she replies; ‘You do not want it’ (397); a sarcastic retort, delivered with élan, that pricks the balloon of St John’s rhetoric just as it reaches its highest level of sublimity. Jane then interrupts her narrative to explain what his last remark has revealed to her about him: I will not swear, reader, that there was not something of repressed sarcasm both in the tone in which I uttered this sentence, and in the feeling that accompanied it. I had silently feared St John till now, because I had not understood him . . . How much of him was saint, how much mortal, I could not heretofore tell; but revelations were being made in this conference: the analysis of his nature was proceeding before my eyes [emphasis added] . . . I understood that . . . I sat at the feet of a man erring as I. The veil fell from his hardness and despotism . . . I was with an equal – one with whom I might argue – one whom . . . I might resist. (397)

The struggle between them is very far from over, and in the end it will be only the sound of Rochester’s call that will save her from St John’s clutches; but from this moment forward Jane distinguishes between the ‘saint’ and the ‘mortal’ in him, and responds accordingly. By deploying the traditional Christian distinction between the natural man and the saint Jane can pass critical judgement on his motivation and draw the sting from his eloquence, while still respecting in the abstract the Christianity he professes. Yet when she judges St John as a husband, and specifically how he would be as a lover, she brings to bear her own will to power, stripping him of his ‘symbolic’ robes in a way that will enable her in the end to resist his call to heaven.

The Second Scene of Forgiveness After Jane’s sarcastic retort to St John, they argue for several pages. He refuses to take no for an answer, or to accept her proposal of unmarried partnership, and at last declares: ‘we must be married. I repeat it: there is no other way; and undoubtedly enough of love would follow upon marriage to render the union right even in your eyes’ (398–9). Then, in one of the most rousing moments in the novel, Jane, who has been in awe of St John these many months, submissively obeying his every behest,

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    51

replies: ‘I scorn your idea of love . . . I scorn the counterfeit sentiment you offer: yes, St John, and I scorn you when you offer it.’ This moment does not, of course, have the obvious intensity of Jane’s passionate encounters with Rochester; but it is stunning, in a far subtler way, for Jane to tell this man, so austere, so commanding of respect and deference from those about him, to his face that she scorns him. The act of defiance of her superior (as she very much considers him) that Jane commits here is even more impressive than the passionate outburst by means of which she had shocked her aunt many years before; and it is not surprising that St John should feel as profoundly offended as he does. That night, when he is going to bed, he kisses his sisters but neglects to so much as notice Jane. She runs after him to say goodnight, and he replies ‘calmly’. ‘Then shake hands,’ Jane adds (once again here we see, as with Mrs Reed, her urge to join hands in amity with one she has offended), and he does shake hands with her. But What a cold, loose touch he impressed on my fingers! He was deeply displeased by what had occurred that day: cordiality would not warm, nor tears move him. No happy reconciliation was to be had with him – no cheering smile or generous word: but still the Christian was patient and placid; and when I asked him if he forgave me, he answered that he was not in the habit of cherishing the remembrance of vexation; that he had nothing to forgive, not having been offended.   And with that answer, he left me. I would much rather he had knocked me down. (400)

Jane, that good animal, would prefer a physical blow to the punishment this severe Christian calls forgiveness; and yet this forgiveness is given in the freest possible manner by the ‘patient and placid’ Christian – a manner so full and so free that it erases itself (‘he had nothing to forgive, not having been offended’). But Jane perceives with perfect clarity that all this is ideological mystification on the part of the ‘mortal man’ by means of which St John’s vengefulness and drive to dominate her remain hidden from the patient Christian’s conscious purview. For the entire next week he makes Jane feel, as she says, ‘what severe punishment a good, yet stern, a conscientious, yet implacable man can inflict on one who has offended him’ (400). Jane does not possess a language by which she could analyse St John’s motivation precisely in terms of what I am calling ideological mystification. She thus assents at the verbal level to the notion that St John has performed the internal act of forgiveness; but she knows that he is nevertheless punishing her. To explain this apparent paradox, her only recourse is to the language of that same moral ideology that produces

­52    Spirit Becomes Matter the paradox in the first place. As before, she invokes the distinction between nature and grace, between St John as mere sinful man and St John as regenerate soul on his way to heaven, and ascribes sadistic pleasure to the former so that she can continue to ascribe goodness to the latter: . . . I fear the corrupt man within him had a pleasure unimparted to, and unshared by, the pure Christian, in evincing with what skill he could, while acting and speaking apparently just as usual, extract from every deed and every phrase the spirit of interest and approval which had formerly communicated a certain austere charm to his language and manner. To me, he was in reality become no longer flesh, but marble; his eye was a cold, bright, blue gem; his tongue, a speaking instrument – nothing more.   All this was torture to me – refined, lingering torture . . . and this I am sure he did not by malice, but on principle. (401)

With this fascinating and enigmatic description we see Jane’s, and perhaps Brontë’s, language reaching its critical limits, groping against the limitations of the concepts that it has to work with, trying to make them yield insights inimical to the ideology that they represent. These passages do not criticise the doctrine of forgiveness as such; they depict how it operates in the machinery of one man’s moral psychology. That man is, however, not just any man, but one who is living his life in a way that, Jane is convinced, leads to heaven, if anything does. Nor does Jane protest against the doctrinal principle – presumably the principle that sinners must be brought around by stern measures if necessary – that she believes motivates him to torture her; on the contrary, this principle is invoked as the saintly side of the moral psychology of St John’s forgiveness, the side that is not motivated by malice. The only thing that Jane blames on the corrupt man behind the saint is the pleasure she believes he takes in this exercise; but, in what is perhaps her most subtle psycho-ethical distinction, she insists that, while he does take pleasure in torturing her, it is not in order to attain this pleasure that he does it – that what moves him at root, the ‘incentive’, as Kant would call it, is not sadistic ‘malice’ but pure Christian principle.21 Her insistence on this in the face of the sadistic pleasure that she acknowledges is also present in him shows how convinced she is that beneath the imperfections of the mortal man St John is an exemplary, pure Christian. Thus Brontë, through Jane, treats Christianity ‘itself’, in its ideal essence, and St John, insofar as he is true to this essence, as pure and perfect; yet she is relentlessly lucid in her analysis of St John’s empirical economy of ressentiment.22

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    53

Spreading the Master’s Kingdom As Jane is well aware, and keeps repeating, what St John calls his forgiveness of her is in reality his vengeance for her refusal to submit to him. According to Nietzsche’s intriguing surmise, the true, final object of ascetic will to power is the entire world; the entire fiction of the other world is the ascetic priest’s spiritual vengeance against this world for refusing him the absolute satisfaction of his worldly will to power, which he consequently transmutes into spiritual will to power by uniting himself with the all-mastering power of God. But the process of transmutation involves a fearful exertion of will to power against oneself, against the fundamental drives that bind human beings to earthly objects, and in particular against the erotic drive. On this analysis, the spiritualised or sublimated vengeance, expressed in the form of forgiveness, that St John takes against Jane would be an expression of a larger project of spiritualised will to power that was originally a project of worldly conquest, one that was frustrated by an uncooperative world; and it would more specifically be a spiritualised redirection of the sex drive. And this is precisely, in every detail, how Brontë depicts it.23 St John himself confesses the vastness of his worldly will to power, as well as its frustration in this world and its consequent transmogrification into something higher, with a far greater field of conquest: ‘I am simply, in my original state – stripped of that blood-bleached robe with which Christianity covers human deformity – a cold, hard, ambitious man . . . My ambition is unlimited; my desire to rise higher, to do more than others, insatiable . . .   ‘Of the ambition to win power and renown for my wretched self, she has formed the ambition to spread my Master’s kingdom; to achieve victories for the standard of the cross.’ (367)

And with a sure grasp of the overall economy of ascetic will to power, Brontë places this confession immediately after the scene in which he displays to Jane his astonishing mastery over his own powerful erotic drive. When St John is in Rosamond’s presence he is nearly overwhelmed by his desire for her: Flushed and kindled thus, he looked nearly as beautiful for a man as she for a woman. His chest heaved once, as if his large heart, weary of despotic constriction, had expanded, despite the will, and made a vigorous bound for the attainment of liberty. But he curbed it . . . (357)   In spite of his Christian stoicism, when she went up and addressed him, and smiled gaily, encouragingly, even fondly in his face, his hand would tremble, and his eye burn. (360)

­54    Spirit Becomes Matter Nevertheless, on putting away the portrait of Rosamond that Jane has drawn, and which has profoundly moved him, he tells Jane that his love for Rosamond is a mere ‘fever of the flesh’, and must be quashed because it stands in the way of his will to power; it is at this point, then, that he makes the confession of exorbitant ambition that I have cited above.24 The moment when he overplays his hand and Jane tells us that the scales fell from his eyes is the moment that she puts together the complete picture of his overall ascetic will-to-power economy; and the structure of Jane’s analysis of St John’s nature when she refuses his offer is parallel with that of her analysis of his putative forgiveness. In both cases, the saintly St John (and how extravagantly suggestive is Brontë’s mere act of giving him this name, which alludes to both the author of ‘the most spiritual of the Gospels’ and to that of the Apocalypse) believes he acts for spiritual reasons, and in both cases Jane reads his acts naturalistically, as an expression of a system of drives in which eros has been subjugated, but not eradicated, by ascetic will to power. Jane’s reading of St John is not the conventional criticism of religious hypocrisy that was common in the nineteenth century, and prevalent in European literature since the Middle Ages. St John is no mere hypocrite; and Jane’s critique of him does not stand on the ground of a more perfect understanding of Christian doctrine in its purity. Brocklehurst is a hypocrite; and one of Brocklehurst’s most important functions in the novel is to serve as a contrast to St John. Whereas Brocklehurst is blatantly self-interested, St John has given his life entirely to what he conceives to be the service of God, to the point of giving up a beautiful woman he passionately desires and who is his for the taking. About money he cares less than nothing; his self-control is absolute. It is hard for a mortal man to bury his drives deeper than St John has buried his – a depth at which not drive but religious principle has become the controlling motive purpose, the incentive in the strict Kantian sense. If anyone’s spiritual state can be interpreted in terms of the Axiom of Purity, it is St John’s; yet Jane’s eye is so sceptical regarding the alchemy of Christian spiritual regeneration that she is able to perceive how, even at this depth, the drives continue to operate within him, and to remain unconverted to the metaphysics that sponsors this notion of regeneration. But, because she simultaneously acknowledges the primacy in him of religious principle, she has no recourse but to split him in two, as saint and mortal. Nothing, of course, is more orthodox than the recognition of this split; what is decisive for our understanding of the novel, however, is that for Jane the insuperability of this split (given that the most saintly man is still thus riven) serves as sufficient reason for her to withhold her assent both to him and to the doctrine for which he stands.

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    55

In the end, she is not convinced that even the saintliest man can utter the true word of God, a word that therefore, for her, fails to become the object of faith. In particular, he fails to turn her path away from Rochester and towards eternal life.

Jane’s Rejection of the Key Doctrine That Jane rejects the doctrine of erotic moderation precisely as doctrine, and not just because St John ties it to his demand that she marry him, is initially indicated by the fact that she rejects it even before he asks her to marry him. When Jane becomes elated about receiving her inheritance and sharing it with her cousins, St John expresses to her his hope that ‘when the first flush of vivacity is over’ for her, she will ‘look a little higher than domestic endearments and household joys’. ‘The best things the world has!’ she retorts; but St John responds that ‘this world is not the scene of fruition’, and urges her to ‘not attempt to make it so’ (382). Lest the reader should undervalue this injunction as a mere expression of St John’s Calvinist asceticism, Brontë has had Helen Burns many years earlier voice the same doctrine. This doctrine is of the very essence of historical Christianity, and this reiteration in the novel recognises it as such. St John then urges Jane to ‘restrain the disproportionate fervour’ with which she throws herself into ‘common-place home pleasures’. ‘Don’t cling so tenaciously to ties of the flesh,’ he continues; ‘save your constancy and ardour for an adequate cause; forbear to waste them on trite transient objects. Do you hear, Jane?’ And Jane rejects this doctrine unequivocally: ‘Yes; just as if you were speaking Greek. I feel I have adequate cause to be happy, and I will be happy’ (382). The terms in which St John here states, and Jane rejects, the proper Christian stance toward earthly love and earthly happiness are theologically precise. St John denies that this world, with its ‘trite transient objects’, is the scene of fruition for human beings, and Jane reaffirms in reply that she, for her own part, has, already, here on earth, ‘adequate cause to be happy’, and ‘will be happy’. That transient objects can be the adequate cause of happiness is precisely what the doctrine of erotic moderation, along with the entire edifice of Christian otherworldliness, denies. And Jane’s rejection of this otherworldliness could scarcely be more explicit. St John with orthodox exactitude calls ‘disproportionate fervour’ the feeling with which Jane clings to earthly ties; and Jane, to underline the force with which she rejects his intervention, uses Greek, the language of the Gospels (including, of course, the Gospel of John), as the figure for something utterly meaningless to her: ‘Do you hear, Jane?’

­56    Spirit Becomes Matter ‘Yes, just as though you were speaking Greek.’ Jerome Beaty’s attempt to erect ‘the sacrament of marriage’ into an alternative path to heaven, acceptable to Christian orthodoxy, ignores the crucial fact that this sacrament was instituted precisely to limit the ‘disproportionate fervour’ against which St John cautions Jane, but which she enthusiastically reaffirms, and never afterwards disavows. When St John later expresses his fear that she will go to hell, this is not an expression of some excessive Calvinistic zeal on his part, but his clear perception of the perilous state of her soul, for which, from any orthodox Christian standpoint, fruition, genuine happiness, can only come in the next life, the eternal zo­e of the Gospels. In this world, where there are only ‘transient objects’, there can only be prefigurations of that divine life and eternal fruition; and if one takes the dangerous step of love and marriage, one must constantly remind oneself of the line that must not be crossed.25 This limitation, for a passionate nature, does not go without saying, as certain liberalreligious interpreters will have it in Jane’s case; it requires a constant vigilance and self-mastery on the part of Jane that is nowhere in view.26 These interpreters argue that the mature Jane does change her mind, coming around to accept the necessary limiting of her love for Rochester. A key exhibit in this line of argument is the following retrospective judgement Jane makes when she narrates Rochester’s courtship of her: My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for his creature: of whom I had made an idol. (272)

This passage implies that at the time of writing, what she felt ‘in those days’ has changed, that Rochester is no longer an idol and she now does see God and has thoughts of religion. What Jane says here, however, is not that the creature had at that time taken priority over God in her thoughts, but that the creature had entirely superseded God, that every thought of religion had been banished from her mind. Brontë has framed Jane’s remark in a way that only superficially accords with orthodoxy. It leaves open the possibility of her continuing to love Rochester immoderately, and even as her primary object, while yet maintaining some unspecified place for God, or for her own personal interpretation of the God-concept, in her heart and mind. Exactly what place ‘God’ now has in her heart, she neither says nor implies. This vague relation to deity is probably widespread among nominal Christians, but it is precisely what the explicit doctrines of orthodox Christianity were formulated to combat; and regarding such doctrines, Jane remains evasive to the end.

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The Climactic Rejection of Both Man and Doctrine Despite the fact that Jane has seen through St John’s nature, however, she finds him so charismatic that she keeps slipping back under his spell; and, since the instrument of his incantations is the Word of the Father, there is a powerful ambiguity regarding her response to this Word. She has distinguished between St John the saint and St John the mortal because she has seen that the mortal is suborning the Word in using it to possess her; and she subsequently endures the torture of his forgiveness, which further confirms her insight into his nature. Yet, in the passages to which I now turn, the charismatic force of the mortal man’s utterance is so overwhelming for her that, despite her awareness that it is indeed his utterance of the Word, and not the Word itself, that masters her, she comes to the verge of losing herself in the vision of eternity that he conjures up for her, and she requires the apparently supernatural intervention of Rochester’s voice to pull her away. In this final phase of their agon, St John, having learned from his previous failure, wields scripture so skilfully and tenderly that he becomes, Jane says, like a ‘guardian angel watching the soul for which he is responsible’ (408). This time he does not declare that it is God’s will that she be his wife; he reads to her from Apocalypse and then prays for the salvation of her soul, with such sincerity and force that in the end she is moved and even transported. But Jane meticulously specifies, from beginning to end, even when he reads from Apocalypse about fiery damnation, that St John himself, and not the sacred Word to which he gives voice, is the source of her excitement: ‘. . . [N]ever was his fine voice so sweet and full – never did his manner become so impressive in its noble simplicity . . .’ (406); ‘the words thrilled me strangely as he spoke them, especially as I felt . . . that in uttering them, his eye had turned on me.’ When he prays for her salvation, Jane is first moved, then ‘awed’, by his ‘earnestness’; ‘He felt the greatness and goodness of his purpose so sincerely: others who heard him plead for it could not but feel it too’ (407). Not a breath of a suggestion does she give that the threat of hell has become any more real for her than when she was a girl; her experience is of the thrill of the words as spoken by St John, ‘especially when I felt . . . that . . . his eye had turned on me’. St John then prepares to leave, but before leaving he lays his hand on her head and prays, in a way that precipitates the final crisis. His prayer concludes as follows: ‘Remember the fate of Dives, who had his good things in this life. God give you strength to choose that better part which shall not be taken from you.’ These words present Jane once again, for the last and decisive time, with the necessity of deciding whether or not

­58    Spirit Becomes Matter she will have her good things in this life – a choice that, as St John has set it up, is also between him and Rochester. These words will bring Jane to something that sounds much like beatific vision; but before narrating this moment, she explains the power that inspires her at this moment in the following way: All men of talent . . . – provided only they be sincere – have their sublime moments: when they subdue and rule. I felt veneration for St John – ­veneration so strong that . . . I was tempted to cease struggling with him – to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own. (408)

It is very pointedly not, as, according to orthodoxy, it ought to be, the vortex of God’s will, but that of St John’s, that draws her so powerfully. Jane feels the sound of God’s Word resonating in his voice as, indeed, the power of the Word; but for her the Word merely amplifies St John’s own charismatic power. At no point does she ascribe to the Word any force or validity of its own. The spotlight never veers from St John’s sincerity and passion, as conveyed by the sweetness and fullness of his ‘fine voice’. What is most striking about Jane’s account of this scene, however, is that she breaks off at its very climax to switch into her reflectiveretrospective mode, in order to specify that even with this level of amplification of the divine Word, and with St John at his maximally sublime, when the gates of heaven are beginning to open for her – even at this moment, she does not come as close to giving in as she had once before with someone else: I was almost as hard beset by him now as I had been once before, in a different way, by another. I was a fool both times. To have yielded then would have been an error of principle; to have yielded now would have been an error of judgement. (408)

From the standpoint of literary art, this statement is remarkably inept in its circumspectness. Jane evokes Rochester with unmotivated demureness only as ‘another’, and then rather prissily lifts the matter into abstraction with the scholastic distinction between an error of principle and one of judgement – when what is really at stake has just been vividly evoked as the choice between this world and the next. This is the same kind of evasive, incoherent recourse to moral ideology that we saw earlier in Jane’s decision to break away from Rochester. At such moments, Brontë either momentarily reaches the limits of acumen of her critical psychology, or she becomes consciously evasive as the direct confrontation with Christian doctrine looms. Jane’s circumspectness

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here throws into soft focus what is in truth a religiously scandalous confession: that heaven itself at its most vivid, as evoked by one of God’s chosen, does not appeal to her as much as the passion of her earthly lover once did. The full force of the religious scandal involved here does not, however, become manifest until the next paragraph. Only then does Jane narrate the astonishing moment of maximal temptation by the eternal, which judgement will reject – the temptation to sacrifice this world for ‘safety and bliss’ in the next: The Impossible – i.e. my marriage with St John – was fast becoming the Possible. All was changing utterly, with a sudden sweep. Religion called – Angels beckoned – God commanded – life rolled together like a scroll – death’s gates opening, showed eternity beyond: it seemed that for safety and bliss there, all here might be sacrificed in a second . . .   ‘Could you decide now?’ asked the missionary.

Amazingly, after Jane’s repeated, and apparently conclusive, rejections of St John’s offer of marriage, he still manages, by evoking eternity, to make marriage to him seem ‘Possible’ to her. We have already been informed that it is only ‘almost’ as strong a temptation as the one she experienced with Rochester; and yet, the words in which she describes this new temptation are so enraptured, the vision of eternity so vivid, that it is hard to imagine something more powerfully tempting. If a vision like this is not enough to convince Jane that ‘this world is not the scene of fruition’, then what would be? And it is not enough; Jane replies to St John that she could agree to marry him if she were but ‘convinced’ that it was ‘God’s will’; but, as she comments to the reader, ‘clouds yet rolled’ about her intimations of immortality, which apparently lose their vividness for her the moment St John’s rich voice ceases to conjure them up. And as long as she is not absolutely convinced, the preacher’s charisma aside, that the prize for giving up ‘the good things of this life’ is an eternity of safety and bliss, she will take her chances, thank you very much, with those things, and one big thing in particular, whose voice she is about to hear across the distance. It is not surprising that critics have had such a hard time agreeing on just where Jane’s spiritual progress ends up. Brontë is at once explicit and evasive about it, as though she wanted to both stage and avoid a direct confrontation with orthodoxy. It is hard not to suspect that she has made the character of St John so repellently cold precisely in order to create for the careless reader the impression that it is he, not the doctrines he voices, that Jane rejects, and in this way to throw a light veil over the starkness of Jane’s choice. But it is certain that Jane rejects

­60    Spirit Becomes Matter the doctrines as well as the man, and independently of her rejection of him.27 Jane had already, earlier that same evening, rejected the saintly missionary path itself, in isolation from her rejection of St John. At the start of this earlier scene, St John repeats his offer of marriage, and Jane repeats her counter-offer to go to India with him as his assistant. St John then momentarily accepts her refusal and proposes instead that she go to India as the ‘coadjutor’ of another missionary’s wife (403). But Jane instantly rejects this proposal with the objection ‘God did not give me my life to throw away’. This reply is ideologically correct but incoherent in the context, since going to India as St John’s assistant and going as someone else’s are in either case equally saintly and in either case equally deadly. Yet she considers only one of them to be God-forbidden suicide. This shows once again that it is really her interest in St John – not in God or in the missionary task as such – that motivates her willingness to go. As though aware of the feebleness of her reply, Jane stumbles from it into a confession of her real motive: ‘Moreover,’ she adds, ‘before I definitively resolve on quitting England, I will know for certain, whether I cannot be of greater use by remaining in it than by leaving it.’ As so often, Jane’s honesty is deflected into ideologically correct terms: not her desire or need or pleasure would keep her in England, but the ascetic motive of making herself ‘of greater use’. St John, however, sees through this dissimulation, and brings the matter into the full glare of doctrinal light: ‘I know where your heart turns and to what it clings. The interest you cherish is lawless and unconsecrated. Long since you ought to have crushed it: now you should blush to allude to it. You think of Mr Rochester?’

Jane is abashed, and by her silence indicates the truth of St John’s accusation; this abashment indicates that Jane does indeed see her love of Rochester as ‘lawless and unconsecrated’, at least by the lights of Christian orthodoxy. She never for one moment challenges the orthodoxy of the doctrine of erotic moderation; but she rejects the idea that it need apply to her, as when she says she has ‘adequate cause’ for happiness in this world, or, in the present case, indicates this rejection by falling silent. What she dare not do is explicitly avow the unorthodox belief she apparently holds, in another conception of God, as a deity who doesn’t mind if human beings find their supreme happiness in loving each other rather than Him – and whose precise relevance qua deity would, consequently, become, by orthodox lights, baffling. Despite her settled rejection of St John’s offer, however, when Jane later that evening sees her vision of heaven, she is sorely ‘tempted’ by

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eternity (though not, and I underline the heterodox nature of this, as much as she had previously been tempted by Rochester), so sorely that it will require the notorious supernatural voice to pry her free. The much discussed question of how she is able to hear Rochester’s voice is insignificant compared to the religious scandal of the voice’s psychological power: Suddenly [my heart] stood still to an inexpressible feeling that thrilled it through, and passed at once to my head and extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock; but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on my senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor, from which they were now summoned, and forced to wake. . . . . . . It was the voice of a human being . . . (409)

The voice’s effect on Jane is described in prodigally extravagant hyperbole. The mind’s ‘utmost activity’ – meaning, presumably, Jane’s moment of ecstatic vision, in which she has seen ‘death’s gates opening’ and ‘eternity beyond’, and which, in its aftermath, has left her, as she says, ‘more excited than [she] had ever been’ – is now declared mere torpor compared to the thrill that runs through her heart at the sound of a beloved, strictly mortal voice, the sound of which forces her ‘to wake’ from her torpor. The proximal objects between which Jane is choosing are not heaven and earth, or, what for Christian orthodoxy comes in the end to the same thing, heaven and hell, but rather two human voices – one that evokes visions of eternity (St John’s) and one that binds her to this earth (Rochester’s) – and the latter makes her so intensely awake that even her vision of eternity is by comparison mere torpor. This is the hyperbolic discourse of visionaries and mystics; but no renegade mystic that I know of had ever used it to describe the effect of the voice of a strictly earthly lover that pulls one away from beatific vision toward someone palpable. This is the tradition of troubadour or trobairitz erotic heresy carried beyond the point to which anyone had ever taken it before, and indicates more forcefully than any other moment in the novel the primacy of the creature in Jane’s affections.

Why, Then, Does the Novel Give St John the Last Word? In the earthly gospel of Jane Eyre, which does not imagine an eternity for the expiation of wrongs, the violence by which one human being oppresses or transgresses against another cannot simply be forgiven – except, perhaps, by an otherworldly dreamer like Helen Burns. If such

­62    Spirit Becomes Matter violence is not expiated, vengefulness goes underground and perverts human relation, as in the case of St John, who believes Jane has been intolerably unjust to him, and perhaps also in the case of Jane’s treatment of her dying aunt. There are, of course, by our lights, serious limits to the applicability of the principle of ethical vengeance proposed early in the novel by Jane. How much injustice is sufficient to justify a violent response, and what kind of violence is justifiable? The violence in question in this novel is mostly verbal and moral, as human beings use language, moral ideology, status distinctions and even subtle behavioural cues to dominate others; it is not generally physical violence.28 But there is physical violence too. Jane hits her cousin John; Helen Burns mentions the decapitation of King Charles I by the aggrieved revolutionaries, during the same discussion in which Jane defends the principle of ethical vengeance; Bertha stabs her brother and burns down Thornhill Manor; and it is necessary to consider whether these acts of violence have anything to do with the principles of forgiveness and ethical vengeance that are central to the novel. Bertha’s culminating vengeance against Rochester, in particular, forces us to confront the question of whether in the overall design of the novel her act is conceived as ethical vengeance, and therefore justified. That would be truly pagan and savage, by the standards of either Brontë’s society or our own; and one might suspect that Charlotte Brontë could as little avow such a belief as she could explicitly deny the fundamental Christian doctrines of eternal life and of the erotic primacy of the creator. But we have been aware since Gilbert and Gubar of how much there is in the novel that links Bertha’s rage to Jane’s. My own argument, however, concerns not the psychological relation between Bertha’s vengeance and Jane, but the role this vengeance plays in the overall ethical economy of the novel, and in its structure of reflection on the moral psychology of forgiveness. In this perspective, it is clear that even Jane’s unmeasured love for Rochester, and even the ecstasy of her visionary or hallucinatory experience of his voice, do not suffice to make their concluding union emotionally possible: the price of this concluding harmony is the one Bertha exacts from him. Rochester has been guilty of attempting to dominate and appropriate Jane, and, at the level of pure struggle for predominance between living beings, as one pole of an erotic dyad, he must be cut down to size before she can return to him. In Jane’s absence, more or less magically (that is, without Jane’s having to do anything), Bertha (whether we think of her as Jane’s double or not) has carried out the pedagogy of ethical vengeance on the arrogance of Rochester, thus creating the

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extremely unsentimental condition under which the sentimental ending is possible. There is a parallel, quasi-magical operation of this principle in the case of St John, who is guilty of a worse, because subterranean, violence against Jane. The book ends with Jane’s account of St John’s impending death in India, and if Jane does not kill him any more than she maims Rochester, the ruin of St John’s organic body completes the symmetry between his role in the tale and Rochester’s, each of these strong men suffering an extreme corporal reduction in the aftermath of his attempt to appropriate Jane. And in both cases, the result of this reduction is that Jane is able to let down her defences against them and give them her unreserved loving sympathy. Jane can come back to Rochester only when her power is greater than his, when she must become the ‘right arm’ of this formerly so powerful man. We should think her next to Milton’s Dalilah; Jane’s culminating mastery over Rochester, like that to which Dalilah is so powerfully drawn after the fall of Samson, manifests itself as service rather than as outright domination. And, as the architecture of the entire novel shows, this is the power of the gift once again. The tables have been turned; it is Jane rather than Rochester who now holds this power, and in its potentially most perverted form – as the power to benefit the afflicted and suffering. When we see somebody suffer [Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science], we like to exploit this opportunity to take possession of him; those who become his benefactors and pity him, for example, do this and call the lust for a new possession that he awakens in them ‘love’; and the pleasure they feel is comparable to that aroused by the prospect of a new conquest.29 Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests; for them easy prey – and that is what all who suffer are – is enchanting. Pity is praised as the virtue of prostitutes.30

These characteristically brutal observations by Nietzsche do not apply without qualification to Jane’s concluding relation to Rochester; her love for him cannot be simply reduced to pity and the desire to appropriate him. But something of this is clearly operative, and Brontë is too ethically lucid, too honest in her perception of moral psychology, not to make Jane herself at least partly cognisant of this. ‘It is a pity to see [your mutilated arm],’ she says to Rochester, ‘and a pity to see your eyes – and the scar of fire on your forehead: and the worst of it is, one is in danger of loving you too well for all this; and making too much of you’ (Chapter 33). And a little later: ‘I love you better now, when I can really be useful to you, than I did in your state of proud independence,

­64    Spirit Becomes Matter when you disdained every part but that of the giver and protector.’ Jane clearly occupies now, in regard to Rochester, the position of ineluctable gift-giver that she occupied in relation to her dying aunt, and this is the condition of her fuller love. The logic of inverted will to power (where domination is acted out in the form of submission and service, and which, as I will show in the next chapter, is relentlessly played out in Middlemarch, in Dorothea’s relation to Casaubon) is only hinted at in the relation between Jane and Rochester. The ferocity of Jane’s struggle with Rochester (which had almost resulted in her death) gives way to the perfect happiness of the ending, as the logic of sentimental romance takes over and this part of the novel loses its edge. But the novel does not end there. In a turn that has given Jane Eyre criticism its most inscrutable puzzle, the earlier, profound struggle with St John gives way in the concluding paragraphs of the novel to a rhapsodic, apparently unqualified affirmation of his missionary task and of his sure path toward an ‘incorruptible crown’, and it is this affirmation that is the novel’s last word. How are we to avoid the conclusion that in the end, and despite everything I have pointed out about the novel, the balance between the romantic and the religious plots falls on the side of religion? The fact that Jane gives St John the last word, and that in her own commentary on this word she seems wholeheartedly to accept his religious credo, strongly implies that she has tacitly changed her mind with regard to eternity in the interim between their last meeting and now. Yet, if Jane has indeed come around to full belief, for which she would need now to love God more than she loves Rochester, why, as Dale has stressed, does she never make an explicit confession of faith?31 Given the clarity with which she earlier indicates her lack of belief in an afterlife and rejects the doctrine of erotic measure, and the completeness, when she returns to him, of her devotion to Rochester, whom she still calls ‘master’ (a striking word, in this context, given its use in reference to Jesus by the disciples, in English translations of the Gospels), how can a merely implied turn to orthodoxy be enough? For Beaty, the turn to orthodoxy is not merely implied; there is decisive evidence that Jane does in fact thus turn when she discovers that it is the intercession of God Himself that has enabled her to hear Rochester’s voice across the distance. When she at last speaks with Rochester again, he tells her that he uttered those words in the ‘anguish and humility’ of prayer to God, at the precise moment at which she heard them many miles away, and Beaty argues that she ‘is overwhelmed by the implication’ of this revelation, ‘for what this means is that the telepathy was

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not the work of nature, not intuition . . . but that it was the work of Providence, of Divine Will’ (208). In support of this claim, he cites Jane’s words: The coincidence struck me as too awful and inexplicable to be communicated or discussed. If I told anything, my tale would be such as must necessarily make a profound impression on the mind of my hearer; and that mind, yet from its sufferings too prone to gloom, needed not the deeper shade of the supernatural. I kept these things, then, and pondered them in my heart. (Brontë 436)

On Beaty’s reading, these words stand in for the explicit confession of faith Dale demands; it is, he says, the ‘final confirmation of the ontological world of Jane Eyre’, a world involving ‘the intercession of God in warning and guiding the sinner’ (Beaty 208). Leave aside the fact that even if this were so, it would be very strange, if not alarming, from a traditional Christian standpoint, for God to warn a sinner against the sin of dying in service to Him, and doing so by making His own voice heard through the medium of an earthly lover longing for the bodily return of his beloved. The more fundamental question is whether Beaty is reading his proof text correctly. If the text is correctly understood as Beaty understands it, why is it articulated in such an odd way? As Dale pointed out in his earlier discussion (which Beaty does not address), . . . the obvious thing for Jane to do at this moment is to tell Rochester about it and for both of them to celebrate the wonders of God’s providence . . . Yet she withholds the information from Rochester, while with us she is strangely noncommittal. (118) The explanation for not revealing the coincidence to Rochester is, as Brontë must have recognized, a tremendous non sequitur. The suffering mind, ‘prone to gloom,’ – not only Rochester’s but her own – wants precisely the reassurance of supernatural and benevolent intervention that she withholds. (123)

To press Dale’s point further: what makes the passage so ‘strangely noncommittal’ is, specifically, the wording of the supposed reference to God, the phrase ‘the deeper shade of the supernatural’. ‘The supernatural’ is a field that can be diversely understood, and which, as such, has no definite doctrinal implications. If Brontë had wanted to convey the doctrinal implications deduced by Beaty, she could just as easily have had Jane refer to ‘the intercession of God’. But in that case the non sequitur remarked by Dale would have been blatantly, and intolerably, apparent, for it makes no sense for Jane to suggest that Rochester’s

­66    Spirit Becomes Matter gloom would be deepened by the deeper shade of God’s intercession on his behalf. If anything can lighten a sinner’s earthly gloom, surely it would be the knowledge that God has answered his prayers. If, however, we take the phrase at its word, there is no non sequitur; the supernatural is evoked as something abyssally mysterious, something dark, darker than Rochester’s already-existing gloom. Maybe it’s a kindly God guiding the sinner, and maybe it’s something else; Jane remains as agnostic about this as about every other aspect of Christian belief apart from the bare notion of a ‘Mighty Spirit’ to whom she can talk (but whose own voice she hears only through the dubious mediation of St John’s).32 Dale argues that Brontë and Jane construe Christian doctrine in conservative, traditional terms, of the sort represented by St John Rivers, but never explicitly embrace it in this form; I have added the claim that on the most important point they explicitly reject it. On either reading, Brontë is not so slack-minded as to think that becoming a Victorian ‘angel of the home’ is acceptable to Christian orthodoxy as an alternative to heroic sainthood of St John’s type. Thus she unambiguously gives the palm to St John at the end, while remaining evasive about the precise nature of Jane’s own spiritual condition as judged by an orthodoxy the status of which is left suspended. Jane has nothing but praise for St John at the end; but this is fully explicable by the fact that she has no longer any reason to criticise him. Now that he is no longer a threat to her, and indeed on the verge of death, she can (precisely as in the case of her dying aunt) afford to forget past wrongs and open her heart unreservedly to his vision of eternal bliss – for himself.33 The reader, however, should have a more critical memory of St John and of his visions than Jane now does, and should read these concluding paragraphs in the context of earlier events. Jane, we recall, had remained aloof from St John’s vision of heaven even when she had a direct experience of it herself, ascribing this experience to the persuasive power on her of St John’s own passionate belief in it. Why would the evocation of the other world by St John’s written words secure Jane’s wholehearted assent, when his rich voice had failed to do so? At first sight, this is just what seems to happen. When Jane exalts St John, her voice seems wholeheartedly to share St John’s credo, and her voice, at the end, to become indistinguishable from his: No fear of death will darken St John’s last hour: his mind will be unclouded; his heart will be undaunted; his hope will be sure; his faith steadfast. His own words are a pledge of this: – ‘My Master,’ he says, ‘has forewarned me. Daily he announces more distinctly, – “Surely I come quickly!” and hourly I more eagerly respond, – “Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!”’

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That the ‘I’ of the concluding sentence of the entire novel, which eagerly awaits the coming of Jesus, should be not Jane’s, but that of St John’s cited words, is remarkable in itself; even more remarkable is the play of pronouns and quotation marks (such that ‘he’ and then ‘I’ abruptly cease to be St John and become Jesus, then switch back to St John) that we must negotiate in order to be quite sure whose I is speaking at each moment. In this confusion of pronouns, the resounding declaration of faith seems to become as much Jane’s as St John’s. Yet close attention to this thicket of language reveals that Jane’s own I is never appended to a declaration of faith. Jane says I only when she speaks of her feelings about St John himself: ‘The last letter I received from him drew from my eyes human tears, and yet filled my heart with Divine joy: he anticipated his sure reward, his incorruptible crown’ (441). The notion that she feels ‘Divine joy’ for him is the single piece of evidence that could be marshalled for the view that Jane now shares St John’s vision of eternity; but it runs squarely up against her own earlier refusal, at the moment of decision, of precisely this vision in favour of ‘the way of Dives’, a refusal that she has never rescinded, and is in fact now living out. And then consider how she goes on: ‘No fear of death will darken St John’s last hour; his mind will be unclouded; his heart will be undaunted; his hope will be sure; his faith steadfast. His own words are a pledge of this . . .’ The drumbeat of the third person in this sentence is insistent: his mind, his heart, his own words. It is for him that immortality is a fact, and Brontë studiously keeps Jane from asserting that it is a fact for her.34 Nothing in her words suggests that her reaction to his religious fervour now is fundamentally different from her reaction to his final appeal years earlier, just before she heard Rochester’s voice across the distance: ‘He felt the greatness and goodness of his purpose so sincerely: others who heard him plead for it, could not but feel it too’ (407). Once the play of pronouns in these paragraphs is recognised, the only other apparent bit of evidence for Jane’s own belief in resurrection evaporates: the ‘Resurgam’, I will rise again, that she presumably has caused to be inscribed on Helen Burns’s gravestone. Why is it not ‘resurget’, she will rise again? The third-person resurget would imply the belief of the inscriber; resurgam by contrast, the word that (presumably) Jane has actually chosen, as in the case of her references to St John, deflects the expression of belief onto Helen and leaves Jane’s own belief in shadow. Once we are alerted to this deflection away from Jane of definite expressions of orthodox belief, it becomes evident that this is also afoot when Rochester tells her of the prayer in which he called out her name. Rochester himself is overwhelmed with religious feeling at that moment,

­68    Spirit Becomes Matter and falls on his knees to worship ‘the Redeemer’, while Jane herself neither seconds his conviction nor joins in his prayer (437). And when she narrates the return of vision in one of Rochester’s eyes, as well as the birth of her first child – an occasion on which it is practically obligatory that she should give thanks to God – she deftly displaces this acknowledgement entirely onto Rochester (440). We know that she is capable of engaging in full-throated prayer; her narration informs us that she did so when she feared for her life during her time as a vagrant. This makes her evasiveness about her own belief at the end of the novel all the more striking, as though her fervent prayers in the face of imminent death were only expressions of the ‘there are no atheists in foxholes’ principle, or as though her encounter with St John has made her more critical and reticent about Christian piety than she had been before. What is not left in the slightest shadow is the persistently idolatrous character of her feeling for Rochester. He is her ‘beloved master’ (432); his very glance can give her life (413); she remarks to the reader that ‘in his presence I thoroughly lived; and he lived in mine’ (426); and to Rochester she says ‘All my heart is yours, sir; it belongs to you, and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever’ (433). When she completes her retrospect of their first ten years together in the final chapter, she says that ‘No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am; ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh’ (439). Never, at any point, is there the slightest qualification of what she explicitly designates as the absolute, unbounded nature of this intimacy. Jane Eyre is thus in its own, quieter, subtler way as much an affront to orthodox or symbolic Christianity as is Wuthering Heights, and manifests the same refusal of another world in favour of this earth and its earthly loves. This refusal is veiled by the persistence of Jane’s imaginary relation to God, to whom, in her final first-person reference to deity, she refers noncommittally as a ‘Mighty Spirit’, to whom she prays, as she says, ‘in my way’ (410). Jane’s imaginary Christianity (if it can be said to remain Christianity) lacks even the doctrinal outlines to which Helen’s belief still adheres, and this lack of definition, this very modern slackness and vagueness, of her belief enables her successfully to navigate the symbolic order of society while resisting the modes of social and personal domination that in this order are so closely bound up with the institution of Christianity. Brocklehurst may be an obvious hypocrite, and St John perhaps a saint, but both equally, in their conflicts with Jane, attempt to suture the ascetic morality they preach back onto the symbolic fabric from which for Jane it has come undone, in order to give a force or authority to that morality that for her it simply does not have.

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Notes   1. Jeffrey Franklin, ‘The Merging of Spiritualities: Jane Eyre as Missionary of Love’, Nineteenth Century Literature 49.4 (1995): 465–82; citations from pp. 479, 480.  2. Peter Allan Dale, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s “Tale Half-Told”: The Disruption of Narrative Structure in Jane Eyre’, Modern Language Quarterly 47.2 (June 1986): 108–29. Dale’s trenchant essay has had little impact, apparently because his historically well-grounded insistence on the severity of traditional Christianity – what we might call the Christianity of the symbolic order – is of interest to neither the liberal Christian nor the secularist critic. Attention was first called to the absence of a conversion scene in Jane Eyre in Barbara Hardy, ‘Dogmatic Form: Defoe, Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy and E. M. Forster’, in The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel (London: Athlone Press, 1964). Carolyn Williams concludes that the conversion scene is missing because ‘such a transformation never really occurs’ in her fascinating piece ‘Closing the Book’, in Jerome J. McGann (ed.), Victorian Connections (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), p. 69.   3. Jerome Beaty, Reading Jane Eyre: A Postformalist Paradigm (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996). Beaty argues that within orthodox Christianity there is a ‘way of eros’ that constitutes a path to salvation on a par with the ‘way of agape’ chosen by St John. Arguments with a similar tendency are made by Marianne Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Essaka Joseph, ‘“Almost My Hope of Heaven”: Idolatry and Messianic Symbolism in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre’, Philological Quarterly 81.1: 81–107; and Allison Searle, ‘An Idolatrous Imagination? Biblical Theology and Romanticism in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre’, Christianity and Literature 56.1 (Fall 2006): 35–61.   4. See Susan VanZanten Gallagher, who judges in terms of a ‘Christian feminist’ standpoint, in her article ‘Jane Eyre and Christianity’, in Diane Long Hoeveler and Beth Lau (eds), Approaches to Teaching Brontë’s Jane Eyre (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1993), pp. 62–8.  5. Thormählen: ‘The Rochesters’ human love is in perfect harmony with Divine love and hence as close to perfection as any earthly thing can be’ (The Brontës and Religion, p. 218).  6. ‘Forgiveness tout court’, Jankélévitch writes, ‘is pure grace.’ Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 111. Reading Jankélévitch, one readily sees why Levinas and Derrida took an interest in his thought. These three thinkers are of course all Jewish, but their meditations on forgiveness harmonise with the deepest logic of the Christian concept.   7. This relation is inverted in the so-called Lord’s Prayer, which seems to call on God to emulate the petitioner’s forgiveness; but it is clear that God’s grace is the original model.   8. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Beth Newman (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), p. 47. This edition is cited throughout.

­70    Spirit Becomes Matter  9. This formula encapsulates the most profound kernel of the idealised, ideological rationale for imperialism, the sense that in prosecuting it the European takes on a moral task. If the second clause (‘Christians and civilised nations disown it’) seems to imply that there could be civilisation without Christianity, so long as vengeance were disowned, the first half has already foreclosed this possibility, attributing the acceptance of vengeance not only to those who lack civilisation (‘savage tribes’) but to ‘heathens’ in general. ‘Christians and civilised nations’ thus strictly means not ‘Christians and other civilised peoples’ but ‘individual Christians and the collectivities they form’. By introducing the question of forgiveness into the novel in this way, Brontë evinces at least a glimmer of awareness of the world-historical resonance of her otherwise highly personalised inquiry into moral ideology. In a related vein, the precociously well-read Helen, just before Jane posits her own doctrine of retaliation against injustice, has declared herself a supporter of Charles I and an enemy of the English revolution: ‘. . . I like Charles – I respect him – I pity him, poor murdered king! Yes, his enemies were the worst: they shed blood they had no right to shed’ (67). When Jane defends the principle of ethical vengeance, then, she is implicitly taking the side of the rebels in the English revolution. 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), I, 6. 11. When her aunt lies dying, Jane’s thoughts turn again to the question of the afterlife. ‘Whither will that spirit – now struggling to quit its material tenement – flit when at length released,’ she wonders, and then remembers Helen Burns’s doctrine of ‘the equality of disembodied souls’ (237). This question implies a belief in the separability of soul and body, but the question of its destination is left open. Jane might have in mind heaven and hell; or she might be expressing complete mystification as to the destination of the soul after death. And to speak of the souls of the dead as ‘flitting’ somewhere rings an odd note; it lacks the tone of eschatological seriousness that the alternatives of heaven and hell would seem to require. However all this may be, this whole incident occurs well before Jane’s encounter with St John, after which her attitude toward Christian metaphysics acquires a definiteness that at the time of her aunt’s death it still lacks. 12. Even the minor incident of Jane’s forgiveness of the servant Hannah for turning her away in her hour of need (Chapter 29), which I will not further discuss, is primarily about showing Hannah her proper place as, in spite of Jane’s destitution, her social inferior. This scene, however, may belong to the book’s ‘political unconscious’, because Brontë-scriptor here seems to be entirely in accord with the system of values that authorises Hannah’s subordination. 13. Even Helen Burns derives at least two kinds of power from her principled submissiveness, and would not accept Christian doctrine if this were not the case: the power to craft for herself an integrity of selfhood that lies over and above her wordly abjectness; and the power to exercise a certain measure of self-assertion, of an entirely negative sort, against her oppressors, in the form of her complete imperviousness to discipline. ‘I seldom put, and never keep, things in order [Helen tells Jane]; I am careless; I forget rules; I read

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    71 when I should learn my lessons; I have no method; and sometimes I say, like you, I cannot bear to be submitted to systematic arrangements’ (66).   Thus, when she is beaten by her teacher as punishment for her carelessness, not only does she refuse to cry, she does not even alter her facial expression. By wilfully projecting indifference to punishment in this way, she frustrates her punisher, depriving her of the satisfaction of knowing that she has impressed her power on Helen: ‘Not a tear rose to Burns’s eye [Jane comments] . . . Not a feature of her pensive face altered its ordinary expression. “Hardened girl!” exclaimed Miss Scratcherd; “nothing can correct you of your slatternly habits . . .”’ (64). Miss Scratcherd’s frustration shows her awareness that Helen’s abandonment of resistance is a way of resisting in a way that is deeper and more intractable than overt resistance; by this means Helen subjectively negates the very reality of external disciplinary forces. They have so little claim on her attention that they fail not only in their intended corrective effect but in any evident effect at all; and Helen succeeds by this in affecting her punisher in a way that her punisher cannot affect her. 14. On this topic, I refer the reader once again to Jankélévitch, Forgiveness. On the question of the gift the seminal text is of course Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Norton, 1990), which has given rise to a voluminous literature, of which the most provocative, and the one that has most influenced my discussion here, is Jacques Derrida’s Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 15. Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, ed. Heather Glen (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 325. 16. Rochester’s comparison of mistresses with slaves is, as Susan Meyer points out, ‘given a shocking vividness’ when we reflect that ‘A wealthy white man living in Jamaica before emancipation would undoubtedly have had slaves to wait upon him, and his Jamaican fortune would have been the product of slave labor . . .’ Since this is the background with which the novel provides Rochester, there is a clear implication that he speaks from experience. Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 77. 17. Cf. Carolyn Williams, who argues that Jane ‘never does adopt a belief in God’s law as an end in itself’, but does learn ‘to invoke His name, to produce Him as a figurehead in her text, to use the notion of God’s law in her narrative as a means to an end’. ‘Closing the Book’, p. 70. 18. In an exceptionally rich discussion, Paul Schacht gives a historical account of the development of the value of self-respect in eighteenth-century thought, especially that of Adam Smith. Schacht argues that the conflict between Jane and patriarchal oppression is mediated by this value, which had taken the place in bourgeois society that honour had held in aristocratic society. Self-respect is inherently contradictory, because it involves a regard for the self that is inextricable from a regard for how one is perceived by others, and ‘the contradictions that dog the idea of self-respect take the shape of apparently contradictory values or impulses in Jane’, leading her to be both rebellious and conformist. Yet the contradiction

­72    Spirit Becomes Matter serves Jane well in her struggle with Rochester, in which she uses her regard for convention as a way to resist the ‘threat of male domination . . . Jane stages her revolt [against Rochester] within rather than against the institutions that constrain her.’ Paul Schacht, ‘Jane Eyre and the History of SelfRespect’, MLQ 52.4 (December 1991): 423–53; citations from pp. 436, 445. Schacht’s illuminating discussion, however, cannot account for Jane’s rejection of St John, which involves an abandonment of social convention. St John points out to her that if she were his ‘real sister’ there would be no problem in their living together, but that since they are not actually siblings, ‘practical obstacles’ render their ‘union’ impossible without marriage (396). This reference to the scandalous appearance of a man and woman living together without wedlock has no effect on Jane, for whom at that moment the decisive motivation is her urge to show him that her energy is equal to his. 19. Contrast Thormählen’s reading of this passage (The Brontës and Religion, pp. 78–9). 20. The moment in question exemplifies perfectly what Lacan calls the ‘posture of . . . inadequacy or fraud’ in which an agent of the symbolic order might stand in relation to the law for which he speaks, creating a disproportion between the ‘imaginary’ and ‘real’ father on one side and the ‘symbolic’ father on the other. See ‘On the Possible Treatment of Psychosis’, in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1977), pp. 217–19, where Lacan comments that the ravaging effects [on the psyche of the child] of the paternal figure are to be observed with particular frequency in cases where the father really has the function of a legislator or, at least, has the upper hand, whether in fact he is one of those fathers who make the laws or whether he poses as the pillar of the faith, as a paragon of integrity and devotion . . . by serving a work of salvation, of whatever object or lack of object . . . of the pure, the impure or of empire, all ideals that provide him with all too many opportunities of being in a posture of undeserving, inadequacy, even of fraud, and in short, of excluding the Name-of-the-Father from its position in the signifier. (218–19) 21. On the Kantian ‘incentive’ (Triebfeder), see Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). See also the fascinating Lacanian interpretation of the Kantian incentive proposed by Alenka Zupancic in Ethics of the Real (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 32–5. 22. When Jane attempts to explain to St John the suffering that his coldness is causing her, he is livid. Jane comments: ‘I had finished the business now. While earnestly wishing to erase from his mind the trace of my former offence, I had stamped on that tenacious surface, another and far deeper impression: I had burnt it in.’ Thus St John intensifies his punishment of her, while understanding this intensification as a second act of forgiveness laid over the first. This is then followed by a further attempt at honesty on Jane’s part, which St John interprets as yet another offence, presumably calling for yet another act of ‘forgiveness’, because, he says, ‘it is the duty of man to forgive his fellow, even unto seventy-and-seven times’ (402). This

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    73 is clearly a reference to Matthew 18:22, but St John oddly misstates the required number of acts of forgiveness enjoined by Jesus, which is actually ‘seventy times seven’, not ‘seventy-and-seven’. The mistake is particularly striking because the correct number had been boisterously satirised by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights, in the incident of Lockwood’s first nightmare. 23. Elisabeth Jay, who has a more refined grasp of the doctrinal issues in Jane Eyre than most of its commentators, dismisses St John as self-deluded when he transforms his ‘rational decision to seek another sphere in which to fulfil himself’ into ‘a sense of particular redemption’. Jay clearly sees the doctrinally problematic nature of St John’s confession of the will to power behind his missionary calling, and thinks it so blatantly un-Christian that Brontë must have intended the reader to see him as condemned out of his own mouth. But there is nothing in the book itself that points to such an intention by the author. What there is in the book is a critical analysis of St John’s ascetic will to power, an analysis that is at the centre of Jane’s perception of him. Elisabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 256. 24. Jane had already, beneath his stern Calvinistic tone, intuited ‘turbid dregs of disappointment – where moved troubling impulses of insatiate yearnings and disquieting aspirations’ (345). Critics sometimes quote these words as an indictment of this ambition, but this interpretation fails to take into account that subsequently, when he admits to her that she is right, St John explains these insatiate yearnings as nothing but his impatience to begin his missionary work, which has been indefinitely postponed: to live here buried in morass, pent in with mountain – my nature, that God gave me, contravened; my faculties, heaven-bestowed, paralysed – made useless. . . . I, [God’s] ordained minister, almost rave in my restlessness. (349)

This explanation unequivocally satisfies Jane, and after this her veneration for him grows and grows. Though she does at one point say that she will ‘continue to smile at his ambition’, Jane gives no indication whatsoever, as Elisabeth Jay suggests she ought, that there is anything doctrinally fatal, from her point of view, about St John’s motivation for missionary work; and at the end of the book she expresses only admiration for him. It is only when he attempts to appropriate her by invoking God’s will that she once more becomes sceptical of his motives. 25. I am not questioning the susceptibility to multiple interpretations of Christian doctrine, or of the Gospels themselves, or the right of those who think of themselves as Christians to evolve the religion in whatever direction they choose. In fact, I have myself elsewhere (in Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), Chapter 3) offered a revisionary rereading of the Gospel of John that attempts to carry further Bultmann’s notion that for John the eternal zoe is located in this life. But such possibilities do not alter the historical reality of symbolic Christianity as its most rigorous representatives have understood it, and as it is represented within Jane Eyre.

­74    Spirit Becomes Matter 26. Cf. Kathleen Vejvoda, who argues that at the end of the book ‘Jane has learned to chasten her idolatrous passion’, but admits that ‘her control of it is tenuous’. All the evidence Vejvoda gives for even this tenuous chastening is circumstantial. Kathleen Vejvoda, ‘Idolatry in Jane Eyre’, Victorian Literature and Culture 31.1 (2003): 241–61; citation from p. 258. 27. Here, made maximally explicit, is the structure of Jane’s decision. St John initially presents Jane with two distinct choices rolled into one: A. Choose St John as husband over Rochester, or the reverse. B. Choose God over Rochester by choosing the missionary task, or the reverse.

He conflates the two, arguing that if she chooses A she thereby also chooses B; but she proposes in response to choose B while rejecting A (that is, she is willing to go to India as a missionary, but only as his assistant). This alternative is unacceptable to him. He then hits on the idea of having her go as ‘coadjutor’ to another missionary’s wife, thus presenting her with a revised form of option B. These two options are both consistent with Christian orthodoxy. There is, however, also a third, unarticulated option, which appears to be the one Jane holds out for, but which she cannot articulate as such because it violates the doctrine of erotic moderation: C. Choose God while both rejecting the missionary task and continuing to love Rochester immoderately.



This option can only exist on condition that God be defined differently than he is in St John’s version of option B. St John’s God (that is, the God of historical or symbolic Christianity) is the one who offers eternal life on the strict condition that the believer learn to value that life more than this one, and Him more than any of His creatures. Since this strict condition is the one that Jane cannot bring herself to embrace, she must jettison it from her concept of God if she is to continue to style herself a believer. Option C is entirely possible within an imaginary relation to Christianity; the question that agitates the commentators, however, and which is foregrounded by the novel itself, is whether it is possible within an orthodox Christianity. Jane’s, and Brontë’s, failure even to make option C explicit indicates their recognition of its heterodoxy. What confuses the picture is that one does not have to become a missionary to make God the prime object. There is no reason in principle why Jane couldn’t embrace the following, fourth option: Option D: marry Rochester, but subordinate love of him to love of the creator.



This is in fact what the liberal-religious critics claim she does. But such a subordination requires a vigorous, and explicitly embraced, discipline of restraint on her part, and this is missing. What distinguishes Jane’s vigorous and honest spirit from the flaccidity of the imaginary spirituality of our own time is that, despite the imaginary nature of her own religious belief, she never shows any sign of thinking that she can reject the prime imperative of erotic measure, yet still hope for the Christian heaven. 28. It should be noted, however, that Mrs Reed was permanently traumatised

The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness (Jane Eyre)    75 by Jane’s verbal assault on her. Her description of Jane’s behaviour on that occasion sounds like something out of the film The Exorcist. 29. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), §14. 30. Ibid. §13. 31. According to Dale, the conclusion of the novel is irreducibly ambiguous or even duplicitous. ‘If we have been attending carefully, we do not hear the affirmative answer we expect or, for that matter, the negative one we do not expect . . . [Jane] is made to hover between ironic and revolutionary possibilities of meaning’ (‘Charlotte Brontë’s “Tale Half-Told”’, pp. 126–7). 32. She does of course hear her dead mother speak to her, but this is not very orthodox. 33. Elisabeth Jay arrives at a similar reading of the concluding paragraphs. See The Religion of the Heart, pp. 258–9. 34. Just how Jane’s text absorbs St John’s is explained with admirable finesse by Carolyn Williams, ‘Closing the Book’, pp. 80–5.

Chapter 2

Subincision of the Ethical Subject (Middlemarch)

Middlemarch is a meditation on the nature of ethical consciousness, a meditation that goes far beyond the moral ideology of its time, of its narrator, and of the critics who have been taken in by the narrator’s moralism. Despite her rejection of Christian supernaturalism, or even perhaps because of it, George Eliot remains tied to the moral discourse of Christianity. The language of desire or inclination as the source of wrong action, and of duty and self-denial as its corrective, has an even stronger hold on Eliot’s moral consciousness than it does on Charlotte Brontë’s; and the authoritative declarations of her narratorial persona tend to skew the reader’s attention along the ethical or moral groove laid down by this language. Yet her observation of the currents and eddies of consciousness is so attentive, so compelled by that same requirement of scientific scrupulosity she inscribes within the text itself as Lydgate’s ideal, that her representation of ethical consciousness from the outset fractures the ideological frame of morality within which she attempts to contain it. ‘Drawing on contemporary developments in scientific theory,’ Sally Shuttleworth explains, ‘George Eliot employs the idea of channelled, free-flowing energy to establish a value framework for her novel’; but ‘Dorothea’s natural energy is blocked, dissipated by socially created friction’. This naturalistic stratum of Middlemarch is in accordance with Lewes’s theory that psychology was based on the physiological flow of energy, the tendency of sensation ‘to discharge itself through the readiest channel’.1 Following the protocols of this form of analysis, Eliot’s narrator tracks the movements, blockages and subterranean expressions of Dorothea’s exigent surge of world-shaping energy; at the same time, the narrator continually reasserts an ideal of self-overcoming in the service of moral ideals that, as I will show, can be wildly disconnected from what is being rigorously described in naturalistic terms. But Dorothea herself perceives her own motives only on the level of the idealising

Subincision of the Ethical Subject (Middlemarch)    77

discourse of morality, with the consequence that the fullest meanings of her own moral psychology remain hidden from her. Middlemarch shows with microscopic exactitude how the fullest meanings of conscious intentionality emerge only across time, by way of a complex negotiation between individual intentionality and the social world, a negotiation that is weighted heavily on the side of the social world and plays havoc with the purity of the intention. This failure of intention to fully know or control its own moral intendings – a failure that is, beneath the veneer of narratorial moralising, the pervasive theme of the book – afflicts all its major figures: Lydgate, Ladislaw and Dorothea, as well as, most obviously, Bulstrode. Bulstrode is presented as the most extravagantly self-deceived of the group, yet the anatomy of his self-deception is equally revealing of the characters who are apparently more sympathetic and therefore more shrouded in sentimental mystification – especially Dorothea. Of all of them can be said what the narratorial voice says of Raffles’ mind in the grip of delirium tremens: that ‘the links of consciousness were interrupted’ in them.2

Purity of Heart, Opacity of Moral Consciousness The narrator of Middlemarch holds it possible to improve the moral probity of one’s intention through the growth of imaginative sympathy, such that one overcomes the tendency to see through the lens of desire and learns to understand another person as an ‘equivalent centre of self’, every bit as real and as valuable as one’s own self. Middlemarch appears to tell the tale of how Dorothea undergoes this process of growth, so that her ability to see and aim at the good improves markedly by the end of the book. But both Dorothea’s moral education and the narrator’s understanding of it run afoul of this paradox inherent in the attempt to grasp the other from the other’s own perspective: that in order truly to see another as an equivalent centre of self one would have to enter fully into the egoism that, unless the other has performed the same rare act of self-overcoming (and is therefore in no particular need of another’s sympathy), is constitutive of that other self. This, however, would mean the entire submission of one’s own selfhood to the egoism of the other – precisely what the novel presents as the crisis of Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon, and as the ultimate tragedy of Lydgate’s marriage. The crisis of Dorothea’s marriage is constructed very precisely in the shape of the paradox I have just described, then framed by the narrator with pronouncements about egoism and sympathy that sound plausible enough in themselves but are riddled with incoherence by the situation

­78    Spirit Becomes Matter to which they nominally apply. There is much exercise of sympathy in the rest of the novel as well, yet it is demonstrable that the operative logic is not that of the doctrine explicitly enunciated.3 In the central case of Dorothea, this operative logic shows that enlargement of sympathy beyond egoism, rather than the cure-all for moral blindness, is the entry into new passageways, constituting new possibilities of ideological subterfuge for will to power, of the labyrinth of self-relation and relation to the other – the profoundest of these subterfuges being the belief in selflessness. There is in Middlemarch no greater offender along this line – not even Bulstrode – than Dorothea, whose extremest conceit is expressed in this notion that she articulates to Ladislaw in the course of her innocent seduction of him: ‘I have no longings . . . I mean, for myself’ (287). This belief in the immaculately altruistic character of her desire is what makes the links of Dorothea’s ethical consciousness appear so extraordinarily loose to those around her, especially where erotic desire is concerned, and her ignorance is so invincible that it not only allows her to carry on a perfectly chaste love affair with Ladislaw, glorying in the sense that she is (chastely) the queen of his heart (precisely – as we will see – the same enslavement of Ladislaw’s heart that poor Rosamond will long for in cruder and more explicit, though almost equally chaste, terms), but also enables her, in the very moment at which she discovers her ‘yearning’ for Ladislaw, to feel violently wronged by her husband because he quite accurately perceived the erotic tenor of Dorothea’s and Ladislaw’s relation at a time when Dorothea herself was still wandering in her haze of idealism. Even as the fact that she is in love with Ladislaw begins to dawn on her, she continues to reject Casaubon’s imputation as false and to indulge in self-righteous outrage at what she takes to be its moral lowness. Yet, given that Dorothea herself never until the moment in question (on which I will presently focus) consciously articulates or even feels her unfolding relation with Ladislaw as an erotic relation, there is a sense in which the relation is indeed, as she strongly believes, innocent. The vividness of Dorothea’s own conscious sense of innocence not only determines for her the conviction that she has been impeccably faithful to her husband, but also to a certain degree baffles the narratorial consciousness that tries to calculate for the reader the ethical bearings of the situation. For the temporality of the flow of consciousness, which perceives little more than what is right in front of its nose in the ‘now’ of self-present consciousness, and which sees itself as innocent if nothing blamable is in fact present to it in this now, co-exists with another temporality that determines another system of ethical assessment, and this other temporality determines quite differently the ethical quality of

Subincision of the Ethical Subject (Middlemarch)    79

the past-now that Dorothea knows to have been innocent. This second temporality is that of retrospective or nachträglich ‘subsequent’ reordering, which in Middlemarch is presented as the dimension of the social outside, in which the perceptions of judgements of others recast the meaning of one’s intendings, sometimes violently in contradiction with the meanings we have assigned to them within the privacy of interiority. The split between these two perspectives and these two temporalities constitutes the fundamental tension of the novel at the level of ethical consciousness, for it brings the narration up against the following irony: that it will be the chorus of minor and more or less degraded characters, whom Eliot in The Mill on the Floss satirised as ‘the world and the world’s wife’, who will, from the outside and nachträglich, if somewhat crudely, perceive and by perceiving determine what the narrator calls the ‘rigid outline’ of moral cause and effect ‘with which acts present themselves to onlookers’ (452) – specifically the actions of the major figures, whose own most exigent interior consciousness of these acts will be overpowered by the shaping force of this perception.4

Consequences of Egoism It is not, as in D. A. Miller’s reading, that the community dampens the ardour and flattens the personality of its most interesting members because of their inability to find an adequate mode of expression for their psychological depths,5 but that all these characters, with the exception of Ladislaw, in the course of their pursuit of power fail adequately to acknowledge the interpersonal, economic and political outside – a failure that the novel ruthlessly anatomises. The violent rending open or subincision of their interiority, and the failure of their projects of self-assertion, under the force of the communal gaze and voice is the price Dorothea, Casaubon, Lydgate and Bulstrode all pay for this insufficiency. If there is any lesson that Middlemarch in its totality conveys, it is quite the opposite of that attributed to it by Daniel Cottom, who claims that Eliot reduces all social, economic and political relations to the ‘moral . . . consciousness of a hidden identity in all humanity’.6 The perception of social and political relations in their totality is in fact, from beginning to end of the novel, the mark of the narrator’s superiority of perspective over its central actors, a superiority that manifests itself in the pervasive and often witty irony with which they are treated – even, or perhaps most of all, Lydgate, whose ethico-political economy the narrator analyses as mordantly as she does that of Bulstrode (see Chapter 3). The narrator consistently reiterates the admonition that these are

­80    Spirit Becomes Matter fallible human beings, and that it is our duty as readers to view them sympathetically; however, the shortcoming that makes these characters suffer most and thus transforms them into suitable objects of sympathy is, precisely, their failure to recognise the ineluctable claim that is made on their inmost being by the social outside. This is ultimately the only sustainable sense that the critique of ‘egoism’ has in the novel, and what it speaks to is not the goodness or badness of the people in question but the foundering of the projects that flow from their wills to power. The primary ‘moral lesson’ to be drawn from the novel is, thus, that egoism is an impediment to the successful expression of one’s most essential world-shaping energy. The weight of evidence of the novel as a whole is massively on the side of the thesis I have just articulated; yet all this evidence is mystified by two doctrines enunciated by the narrator, both of which derive from Eliot-scriptor’s commitment to ascetic moral ideology. The first mystifying doctrine is that of sympathy, which confuses the reader by interpreting the relation to the outside as an affective relation of one individual to another, rather than as the relation of physio-psychological energy to its social channels of expression, or obstacles thereto. This doctrine is intricately woven into the text and will require a sustained action of disentangling that will be one of the main tasks of this chapter. The second mystifying doctrine, announced in the prelude and reiterated in the epilogue, incoherently proposes that a will that seeks no satisfaction for itself deserves the ‘illimitable satisfaction’ of world-historical achievement and fame as its only fit reward. It is true that the prelude actually also articulates the notion that Dorothea’s will is frustrated by the lack of institutional channels, but because Eliot conceives her ardent desiring in such a sublime way here, on the model of St Theresa of Avila, even this recognition fails to get to the nub of the matter. Dorothea’s intrinsic merits are not, as Eliot has it here, a simple given that society simply fails to recognise; they are vitiated at the root by Dorothea’s impoverished education, which conditions her failure adequately to perceive and respond to the processes and laws of the socio-political totality. This lack of education is itself an injustice of the social order, of course; but it is one whose disabling effects never come fully into focus in the novel, which thus seems to entreat the social world to accommodate her ardent desire for the good merely as such, without foregrounding the educational reforms that would make this desire socially viable. The prelude says that ‘the function of knowledge’ is what a ‘coherent social faith’ would provide for the ‘ardently willing soul’, which implies that the desiderated faith is a social prosthesis that would make

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up for a deficiency of knowledge. This implication alerts us to the fact that the truest analogy in the overblown comparison between Dorothea and St Theresa is in their little schooling; and Ladislaw, whom critics have so unjustly maligned, is vastly her superior on this score, the sophistication of his education being abundantly evident despite the aspect of mere dilettantism that his free and easy manner, and the curly locks on his head, give. When the moralising overlay of the narration is peeled away, Ladislaw emerges as central to the novel in a way that has rarely been recognised (see Chapter 3). He is central in his own right, as the figure of largest perception and action; but central also for the role he plays in the ironic opening-out of Dorothea’s consciousness that spells the foundering of her initial project of self. Ladislaw allures Dorothea as a window into a wider, more vivid world than that which she has ever known, a world in which her own thoughts find for the first time a satisfying reflection. Yet for that very reason he diverts her will to power away from the project of finding its own path.

Casaubon: Witness of Dorothea’s Ethical Consciousness Here is the scene in which Dorothea’s ethical consciousness of her past relation to Ladislaw is initially reordered through contact with an external view of that relation – her husband’s. Celia has just left the room after informing Dorothea of the provision in Casaubon’s will against her ever marrying Ladislaw, and Dorothea is left to absorb the full significance of this provision: Dorothea by this time had turned cold again, and now threw herself back helplessly in her chair. She might have compared her experience at that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was taking a new form, that she was undergoing a metamorphosis in which memory would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs. Everything was changing its aspect: her husband’s conduct, her own duteous feeling towards him, every struggle between them – and yet more, her whole relation to Will Ladislaw. Her world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew. One change terrified her as if it had been a sin; it was a violent shock of revulsion from her departed husband, who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did. Then again she was conscious of another change which also made her tremulous; it was a sudden strange yearning of heart toward Will Ladislaw. It had never before entered her mind that he could, under any circumstances, be her lover: conceive the effect of the sudden revelation that another had thought of him in that light – that perhaps he himself had been conscious of such a possibility . . . (359–60; italics added)

­82    Spirit Becomes Matter In this passage, which I take to be a milestone in the novelistic representation of interior consciousness, Dorothea’s realisations come to her in a mediated fashion, in the first place as the dawning on her of what Casaubon had been conscious of in the time of her innocence, which she now actually knows; and in the second place as her consciousness of what Ladislaw might also then have thought, which she merely surmises. The scene of her coming-to-consciousness thus also involves the violent opening-out of her interiority as she suddenly internalises the perspective of these others into her view of her own past experience, and primarily the perspective of her husband, who introduces the element of violence into the changing of aspect of Dorothea’s past experience because his suspicion seems to her to contain an unjust accusation against her – although the reader can ascertain by returning to the earlier incident that in fact Casaubon had accurately gauged Dorothea’s innocence and there had been no injustice in the accusation. Her husband’s suspicion is the ethical centre of the storm: he had had ‘hidden thoughts’ about her, thoughts ‘perhaps perverting everything she did’. Perverting it in what way? By supposing that Dorothea had consciously in mind that very possibility that has only now come into her thoughts as a consequence of her discovery of her husband’s suspicion. Dorothea is outraged, filled with revulsion that her husband could (as she supposes) have attributed such a conscious intention to her. She never did have it then. It has come to her now, or at least the fluttering hint of it as ‘a strange yearning of heart’ has come, but it is not yet the full-fledged thought of Ladislaw as her lover, and besides, she smuggles it into her own consciousness in the shadow of the outraged realisation that ‘another had thought of him in that light’. She insulates this new awareness from full avowal by her revulsion at her husband for suspecting such a thing, refusing to ponder the implications of this new emotion that she feels stirring, or what its relation might be to her husband’s presumed supposition at that earlier time, or, most significantly, what role might be played in her ‘sudden strange yearning of heart’ (is it not the first scent of hope?) by her awareness of the possibility that Ladislaw himself might have thought of her, might still be thinking of her, in that light. Not only had Casaubon accurately perceived the vitality and tendency of Dorothea and Will’s earlier relation, the tendency he perceived is eventually fulfilled in the precise way that he foresaw and which caused him such anguish. Given the social barriers between Dorothea and Will, as well as Dorothea’s remarkable freedom from the consciousness of eroticism, the explicit, public statement by Casaubon of the possibility of her marriage to Ladislaw appears to be the necessary catalyst of its actualisation, so that Casaubon, like Oedipus’s father, actually causes

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the event he foresees by his attempt to forestall it. But Casaubon does not manufacture the situation out of whole cloth. There is from the beginning an erotic vitality and an intimacy between Will and Dorothea of the sort that any husband might fear, and the question I want to pursue next is what we are to make of this intimacy as such, as it was in the now of its actual occurrence. How much, and what kind of, reality was there in Casaubon’s suspicion?

Retrospective Construction of Experience In order to investigate the relations between Dorothea’s erotic economy and her consciousness I am going to draw a very limited analogy between her case and that of the little girl Emma discussed by Freud in his Project for a Scientific Psychology, as further analysed by Jean Laplanche in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. I do not by any means propose to psychoanalyse Dorothea; I am only going to borrow the conceptual structure of some of Laplanche’s remarks about Emma’s consciousness in order to articulate my own inquiry into that of Dorothea. According to Freud, Emma’s genitals had been touched by a shopkeeper at the age of eight, but she repressed the memory until, at the onset of puberty, following a second, apparently quite unsexual, experience of shopkeepers, she developed a phobia against shops. I am ­interested only in Laplanche’s commentary on the first of these two incidents: . . . in the first scene we have a sexual content in the explicit behavior of the adult protagonist, but . . . it is a sexual content, as it were, in itself and not for the subject [i.e. Emma]. The scene is sexual for an outside spectator or in the intention of the shopkeeper. For the child it cannot have fully that meaning.7

The first scene is already sexual at the moment of its occurrence, for Emma as well as for the observer, because it is sexualised by the action and intention of the shopkeeper, and Emma is capable of recognising this sexualisation in some intuitive way because, as Laplanche extensively explains, her body, like that of all babies, has already been sexualised by the ‘seduction’ of the mother. But since Emma is too young to have sexual ideas, for her, as opposed to the shopkeeper, it is only obscurely sexual (‘it cannot have fully that meaning’), and this obscurity will only be dissipated nachträglich, ‘subsequently, retrospectively’, by the development of her sexual consciousness. Now compare Dorothea. An erotic meaning is present in Ladislaw’s looks and words to her because they are erotic in his intention, and this

­84    Spirit Becomes Matter erotic meaning is easily divined by the reader as ‘outside spectator’, as well as by another outside spectator who is internal to the story – her husband Casaubon. Yet the narrator conveys no hint that Dorothea has even an obscure consciousness of the erotic tenor of her relations with Ladislaw at the time. Since Dorothea is no child, such a failure of consciousness is likely to strike the contemporary reader as massive repression. Yet Eliot appears to mean us to understand that Dorothea’s purity is such that, as the narrator says regarding a later occasion, ‘her blindness carries her safely’ past the erotic meaning this scene has in itself. For the narrator, and apparently for Eliot-scriptor, the original meaning for Dorothea of her relations with Ladislaw would remain genuinely eros-free, and when she subsequently becomes aware of the erotic meaning it would be completely new for her (though not for Ladislaw or Casaubon), not having previously existed in her psyche in either conscious or ‘repressed’ form. Eliot’s narrator, in other words, sees what a contemporary reader would call sublimation where this reader is likely to suspect repression. As I will show, each of these interpretations, as far as it goes, yields considerable insight into an erotic dimension of Middlemarch that has been surprisingly neglected by critics. But neither of them by itself opens onto an account of the total economy of Dorothea’s relation to the social outside, which is driven in the final instance (third hypothesis) by an exceptional will to self or will to power, a will that seeks through the avenues of ascetic morality and the aim at the ‘greatest good’ a pure ascendancy of distinction from those around her, ‘as though’, in Ladislaw’s admiring observation, ‘she were under a vow to be different from all other women’. This third possibility does not exclude but reinterprets the first two. Purity of spirit, together with the altruistic sympathy that is its animating force, are now seen as not the final, irreducible ethical fact, but, rather, as the instrument by which Dorothea’s will to power struggles against the constraints of her social outside, in ways that are subtle and self-contradictory, and which include something like, but more complex than, repression.

Rosamond: Dorothea’s Erotic Double Eliot’s astonishingly subtle depiction of the awakening of Dorothea’s erotic consciousness involves a dialectical interaction between Dorothea and Rosamond in the course of which Rosamond’s erotic consciousness is revealed as the truth of Dorothea’s, and is then ‘reflected back’

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into Dorothea as the core around which it will ultimately come to full realisation. The parallel between the two women begins to unfold early in the novel. Rosamond immediately upon drawing her first sparks from Lydgate begins to weave the tale of love around him that Dorothea fails to imagine with respect to her comparable experience with Ladislaw. Of course Dorothea is already married, whereas Rosamond is looking for a husband; but that this needn’t make a difference is made clear by the fact that later, when Rosamond is married, she recognises the selfsame Ladislaw as a possible lover, and in the same context of newly felt disappointment with a neglectful husband that was in place for Dorothea at the time of her own early relation with Ladislaw. Despite the profound differences between these two women, thus, the structural parallels between them are very strong. The Dorothea–Ladislaw–Rosamond triangle comes to a head in the fateful scene late in Chapter 77 in which Dorothea, on a mission of mercy to Rosamond on behalf of Lydgate, walks in on a passionate tête-à-tête between Rosamond and Ladislaw; it is in the aftermath of this ‘discovery’, as she mistakenly believes it to be, that Ladislaw and Rosamond are in love that Dorothea finally feels or is able to bring forth (but only through the ascetic route of renunciation) the full overwhelming force of her own love. The earliest stage of the erotic dialectic that culminates in Chapter 77 is played out in Chapter 43 when Dorothea walks in on Ladislaw and Rosamond in a situation of flirtatious intimacy. This scene casts the first dark shadow on Dorothea’s consciousness of her relation with Will. Will and Rosamond have been singing together when Dorothea, looking for Lydgate, walks in; when she suddenly becomes aware that Ladislaw is in the room, her mind flashes ‘in an instant over many connected memories’ and she makes a hasty exit. Then, as Dorothea rides her carriage to seek Lydgate at the hospital, the narrator explains the complex of thoughts that flashed on her and drove her from Rosamond’s drawing-room: Her decision to go, and her preoccupation in leaving the room, had come from the sudden sense that there would be a sort of deception in her voluntarily allowing any further intercourse between herself and Will which she was unable to mention to her husband . . . That was all that had been explicitly in her mind; but she had been urged also by a vague discomfort. Now that she was alone in her drive, she heard the notes of the man’s voice and the accompanying piano, which she had not much noted at the time, returning on her inward sense; and she found herself thinking with some wonder that Will Ladislaw was passing his time with Mrs Lydgate in her husband’s absence. And then she could not help remembering that he had passed some time with her under like circumstances, so why should there be any unfitness in the

­86    Spirit Becomes Matter fact? But Will was Mr Casaubon’s relative, and one towards whom she was bound to show kindness. Still, there had been signs which perhaps she ought to have understood as implying that Mr Casaubon did not like his cousin’s visits during his own absence . . . She felt confusedly unhappy, and the image of Will which had been so clear to her before was mysteriously spoiled. (317)

Indeed there had been signs, which had not adequately registered on Dorothea’s consciousness, of Casaubon’s extreme dislike of Will. They had been evident enough at the time; every time Will had come up it had led to trouble, culminating in ‘a scene which roused an angrier feeling between them both than [Casaubon] had ever felt before’ (307) – a scene to which I will return. And yet Dorothea, carried along by her attraction to Will, had recurrently forgotten these signs. Now they all flash on her in an instant – not in direct relation to herself, but mediated through the perception of the apparent relation between Will and Rosamond, which Dorothea intuitively perceives as improper because she perceives its isomorphism with her own relation to him (‘And then she could not help remembering that he had passed some time with her under like circumstances’). Her perception of the impropriety of her relation to Will thus passes through an identification with Rosamond. It appears to be a purely formal social impropriety that she censures, the impropriety of Will’s ‘passing his time with Mrs Lydgate in her husband’s absence’; yet Dorothea’s reaction is too quick and powerful to be the result of such a merely formal perception. Rosamond at this moment clearly becomes for Dorothea what Girard called a ‘mimetic rival’; Dorothea is too high-minded to feel jealousy or competitiveness, yet the narration leaves no doubt that powerful emotional forces are set in motion by what Dorothea has seen, forces that run through her entire relation to Ladislaw. Since, however, the relation between Will and Rosamond is at this moment entirely innocent on both sides, Dorothea, ironically, is thinking ‘low thoughts’ about Rosamond akin to those she will later attribute to Casaubon in relation to herself. At this moment in the development of Rosamond’s relation to Will, neither Will nor Rosamond herself conceives it as anything more than innocent companionship; it is only subsequently, and even more ironically, by way of modelling herself after Dorothea that Rosamond unfolds the project of enslaving Will’s heart. In the aftermath of Dorothea’s departure, a chagrined Ladislaw expresses to Rosamond his worshipful attitude to Dorothea, and after he leaves we read the following: Rosamond felt herself beginning to know a great deal of the world, especially in discovering – what when she was in her unmarried girlhood had been inconceivable to her except as a dim tragedy in bygone costumes – that

Subincision of the Ethical Subject (Middlemarch)    87 women, even after marriage, might make conquests and enslave men. At that time young ladies in the country . . . read little French literature later than Racine . . . Still, vanity . . . can construct abundantly on slight hints, especially on such a hint as the possibility of indefinite conquests. How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage with a husband as crown-prince by your side – himself in fact a subject – while the captives look up forever hopeless . . . (319; italics added)

Not only is the model to which Rosamond responds, of a woman making conquests while she occupies the ‘throne of marriage’ (a model that, the narrator implies, could, alternatively, have been picked up from a French novel), explicitly that of the Dorothea-CasaubonLadislaw triangle, but, as I will presently show, Dorothea herself had previously indulged precisely the same fantasy of extra-marital conquest that Rosamond here takes up. Hence, drollest irony of all, Dorothea’s absolutely pure relation to Ladislaw stands in for a French romance as a model for Rosamond’s erotic imagination. By a process of reciprocal constitution, each identifies with the other and as a consequence makes a leap forward in the development of her own erotic consciousness. Thus in a crucial way Dorothea and Rosamond are erotic mirror images of each other. The main difference between them at the level of their reciprocal erotic imaginings is that Dorothea, under the influence of her moral ideology, backs into her erotic meanings through the route of denial and denegation, whereas Rosamond, unhampered by moral or ethical considerations, goes with open eyes toward hers.

Dorothea’s Fantasy of Erotic Sovereignty But is the meaning Dorothea backs into one that is born fresh as a consequence of her identification with Rosamond, or is it one that was obscurely present to her qua erotic, even if for her ‘it cannot have fully that meaning’, from the beginning, but which she was, according to my first hypothesis, ‘repressing’? The fact that she so rapidly imagines impropriety in the relation between Rosamond and Ladislaw, and draws the analogy between their situation and hers, supports the hypothesis of repression, because the entire erotic scenario flashes full-fledged on her imagination. At the very least, there are the ‘signs’ from Casaubon which now, in realising that she ought to have been aware of them, she realises that in some way she had at least subliminally been aware of at the time. Nevertheless, the fact that Casaubon as outside spectator at some point introduced an erotic meaning into her relation with Ladislaw does not necessarily mean that it originally had one for her, even

­88    Spirit Becomes Matter obscurely. At this point what Dorothea seems to realise is not the erotic nature of her relation to Ladislaw but the eroticisation of this relation in Casaubon’s gaze, the fact that to him Will’s visits looked improper from the beginning. There is also Ladislaw to consider. His ‘intention’ is what initially eroticises ‘in itself’ the relation between him and Dorothea. Even though he does not explicitly declare his love to her until very late, already in their interviews in Rome he manifests an ardour toward her that speaks volumes. The interaction between Ladislaw and Dorothea is too serious and sincere to be called flirting, yet there is a free flow of libidinal energy between them that can only be called erotic in itself, and that, moreover, right from the outset involves Dorothea’s decided preference for Ladislaw over her husband. When Casaubon walks in on their first meeting in Rome (precisely as Dorothea later walks in on Ladislaw and Rosamond), the young people are both looking ‘animated’, and Dorothea herself is ‘perhaps not insensible’ of the contrast between the ‘sunny brightness’ of Ladislaw and the ‘rayless’ character of Casaubon’s presence (155). It is this perception, together with the doubts Ladislaw has immediately begun planting in her mind concerning the worth of Casaubon’s work, that begins to undermine Dorothea’s regard for her husband as she feels ‘the first stirrings of a pitying tenderness’ that will take its place (155). By their second private interview, Will makes bold to tell Dorothea it makes him ‘savage’ to think of her imprisoned at Lowick as a consequence of notions comparable to ‘Minotaurs’ that ‘choose the sweetest women to devour’ (163), a shockingly gallant sentiment with which Dorothea finds nothing amiss, receiving it with pleasure as a return of the ‘ardour’ which she has been used to dispense without receiving (164). A few moments later, when Dorothea says that she could never produce a poem, Will says ‘You are a poem’, and then adds his wish that he could ever be of ‘the slightest service’ to her. Dorothea maintains herself sublimely unaware of how little Will’s courtly love talk accords with strict propriety; but given its nature, it is no wonder that eventually this relation will affect Rosamond like a French romance. We can gauge the erotic force of Will’s talk, and the strangeness of the ascetic Dorothea’s willingness to enjoy it, by comparison with the effect made on Rosamond by the compliments Lydgate pays her in a considerably less ardent tone: Rosamond concludes straightaway from them that she and Lydgate are ‘as good as engaged’ (200). Back in England once more, Ladislaw is determined ‘that she should know she had one slave in the world’ (264), and as Dorothea begins to get the idea she finds that she likes it very much indeed; this is the moment at which she indulges the fantasy of romantic sovereignty that

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Rosamond, with the nearly infallible perception enjoyed by the outside spectator in this novel, intuits. ‘I shall have a little kingdom, then, where I shall give laws,’ she says to Ladislaw with an ‘open smile’ (269); this corresponds precisely to Rosamond’s ‘How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage’ in the aftermath of Dorothea’s visit. The narrator with characteristic piety interprets Dorothea’s pleasure as ‘the ardent woman’s need to rule beneficently by making the joy of another soul’ (265), but this is precisely the sort of formulation that maintains within the narrator’s discourse the same partition between innocent and erotic motivation that Dorothea maintains in her own consciousness. Despite the fact that Dorothea and Rosamond share the same fantasy, the relative crudity in the wording of Rosamond’s fantasy carries all the weight of the difference in refinement between her being and Dorothea’s. Nevertheless, Dorothea has been enjoying, in her own ardent and ingenuous way, just that ‘enslavement’ of a second man from the ‘throne of marriage’ that Rosamond imagines; and this pleasure is far from innocuous, for it is what begins ‘to nullify her original alarm at what her husband might think’ about the fact that Will has shown up in the neighbourhood in violation of his express wishes (265). So, then, is Rosamond’s erotic consciousness the truth of Dorothea’s, in the sense that Rosamond reflects the in-itself of Dorothea’s erotic being that, until it is so reflected for her, remains hidden from, repressed by, Dorothea herself, and of which Dorothea can only become conscious when she sees its reflection in Rosamond? The thesis of repression implies that the erotic meaning of Dorothea and Will’s relation is present for Dorothea to see from the beginning, yet is never consciously acknowledged by her. It is a simplistic thesis; yet it responds to the need to acknowledge, and if possible to explain, the apparent wilfulness of Dorothea’s protracted refusal to stamp this relation with an erotic meaning. Erotic meanings are, like all other meanings, social in their essential substance. The meaning Dorothea is ‘repressing’ is not just something in her head; it is something that is clearly visible to the perception of the generalised outside spectator that is her reference-community, and ought to be visible to her, but isn’t. From the very beginning of the novel we are reminded, through the person of Dorothea’s younger sister Celia, that, as this external spectator sees it, Dorothea is so wilfully bent on her own way that she simply refuses to see what is right before her eyes. She does not, for instance, notice, despite Sir James’s assiduous attentions to her, that he is in love with her, until Celia informs her of it. Celia then provides this epigraph for the further course of Dorothea’s love life: ‘I thought it right to tell you, because you went on as you always do, never looking just where

­90    Spirit Becomes Matter you are, and treading in the wrong place. You always see what nobody else sees; it is impossible to satisfy you; yet you never see what is quite plain. That’s your way, Dodo’ (27).

Sublimation and the Doctrine of Sympathy The erotic potential in the relation between Ladislaw and Dorothea is not, however, this relation’s only potential. The novel attributes to Dorothea’s moral ideology the power to shape a narrative, with at least temporary efficacy, different from the one that leads to their becoming a couple. According to my second hypothesis – the one most in harmony with the narrator’s moralising perspective – no erotic intention toward Ladislaw is present to Dorothea’s consciousness, not because this intention is repressed, but, rather, because there is another intention present that is so ‘full’ that it leaves no room for the erotic intention. This other intention would be, in the language of psychoanalysis, a perfectly sublimated one, one that aims at ‘higher’ goals, spiritual attainments. The narrator’s explicit comments about Dorothea are framed; whether we think Dorothea is a successful sublimator or not, the narrator apparently does. On this view, then, Dorothea’s relation to Ladislaw would be erotic ‘in itself’, in his intention, and for the outside spectator who is Casaubon, yet this erotic interpretation would for a long time be held at bay within Dorothea’s psychic economy by the powerful counter-interpretation sustained by sublimation. Sublimation does of course require sexual libido to serve as the energy to be sublimated; but it utterly transforms its sexual character – a sexual character which, in the case of a child raised as Dorothea presumably was raised, would never have been fully established in the first place. In Dorothea’s case, libido becomes caritas or, in the less explicitly Christian term favoured by Comte and by the narrator of Middlemarch, ‘sympathy’. Thus, if the hypothesis of sublimation is to be sustained, the doctrine of sympathy in terms of which the narrator interprets Dorothea’s motivation must be valid, or at least coherent. The doctrine of sympathy would require us to distinguish between two sorts of blindness in Dorothea: a good sort that keeps her ignorant of the erotic meanings swirling about her, and a bad sort resulting from ‘egoism’. What Middlemarch appears to teach is that, if the purity of a will that aims at the fullest good can be maintained (hampered by one kind of blindness and aided by another), however much it might stumble by the way, the subject, guided by the dictates of sympathy, could, by

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the process of experience and suffering, in the end transcend the blindness of egoism and arrive at an accurate perception of the good. This mature perception of the good would then be able to incorporate the erotic awareness to which it was formerly, and necessarily, blind. We are instructed to understand the course of Dorothea’s troubles with Casaubon according to this doctrine; yet almost from the outset it runs into incoherence. When they have their first fight in Rome, over Dorothea’s wish to begin helping with her husband’s work on the ‘Key to all Mythologies’, the narrator comments that ‘She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers; she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her husband which claim our pity. She had not yet listened patiently to his heart-beats, but only felt that her own was beating violently’ (148–9); however, she soon begins ‘to feel herself guilty’ for pressing her claim on her husband (150), and it seems that she is on her way to overcoming her egoism, for ‘in Dorothea’s mind there was a current in which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow – the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good’ (151). This ‘reaching forward’ is supposed, according to the doctrine in question, to depend on the expansion of sympathy; yet the object of Dorothea’s exercise of ‘active sympathy’ who arrives immediately following the above remark is none other than Ladislaw (151). This event gives the lie to the famous principle enunciated much later in the novel that ‘direct fellow-feeling’ is the only safeguard against the misfiring of general doctrine, since Ladislaw draws Dorothea’s ardent fellow-feeling toward him in a way that is in direct competition with her feeling for her husband and therefore ethically compromised. She quickly takes an interest (no doubt in part by way of identification) in his struggles in life to find a vocation. For his own part, Ladislaw almost from the first moment of his friendship with Dorothea works to undermine her belief in both Casaubon’s scholarship and his generosity – and not without malicious, even sadistic, intent, since like a wanton boy he finds sport in killing the ‘buzzing glory’ of Casaubon’s ambition. But Dorothea in the purity of her own intention does not notice Ladislaw’s ulterior motive and continues to pour out her sympathy toward him, a sympathy that later heightens to a fever pitch when she discovers his claim to part of the inheritance that has devolved on Casaubon. After making this discovery she begins ‘innocently’ to work ‘towards the further embitterment of her husband’ by pressing on him Ladislaw’s claims on his money, a marital mayhem that she interprets as an overcoming of her own egoism. ‘The vision of all this as what ought to be done seemed to Dorothea like a sudden letting in of daylight, waking her

­92    Spirit Becomes Matter from her previous stupidity and incurious self-absorbed ignorance about her husband’s relation to others’ (273). This vision is clearly motivated by her sublimated libidinal interest in Ladislaw, but Dorothea is not wrong in feeling that her ethical perception is being enlarged. This enlargement is not, however, produced directly by sympathy of any kind, pure or libidinally based, but by her dawning realisation of socio-­economic reality. Her interest in Ladislaw motivates her to link Ladislaw’s claim to help from Casaubon to some earlier thinking she had done about the nature and justification of the laws of primogeniture (the only instance in the novel of Dorothea’s actually working through a complex thought about socio-economics); as a result, what she formerly in her naïveté saw as Casaubon’s noble magnanimity towards his cousin gives way to a sense that Ladislaw is the victim of injustice, and has a moral right to Casaubon’s money. A complex economy of drives, motives and reasonings thus underlies the enlargement of Dorothea’s ethical purview at this moment, and produces an ironic result. Sublimated libido leads to an accurate assessment of economic reality, and to aggression against Casaubon, for ethical reasons, on behalf of the object of her libidinal interest – all of this interpreted by Dorothea as an awakening from selfabsorbed egoism. There is no indication that the narrator is in control of these ironies, which call into question the notion that ‘direct fellowfeeling’ is the only reliable ethical safeguard, or even that fellow-feeling can really be ‘direct’, yet Eliot-scriptor’s scientific scrupulosity is such that she inscribes on the page all the empirical particulars of the case. To add to the complexity of the moral economy of this moment, Dorothea’s passion for Ladislaw’s claim is partly driven by an impulse of self-denial (always a decisive ethical factor for her): a major portion of the restitution she desires for him has been legated to her in Casaubon’s will, and she thinks this an ‘unfair concentration’ (273) of which she would prefer to be rid. Her blindness to Casaubon’s feelings in this matter, which seems to be an egoistic failure of sympathy, is thus directly motivated by the ideology of sympathy, unselfishness and the ‘least partial good’.

Consider that Casaubon Shrinks from Pity ‘She was blind, you see, to many things obvious to others,’ the narrator comments regarding her belief that Casaubon will want to give Will part of the inheritance, ‘– likely to tread in the wrong places, as Celia had warned her; yet her blindness to whatever did not lie in her own pure purpose carried her safely by the side of precipices where vision

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would have been perilous with fear’ (273). The remark is curious in the context, for how is Dorothea being ‘carried . . . safely’ when her blindness is at this very moment causing the ‘further embitterment of her husband’s mind’? The narrator’s irony, so sharp-edged when directed against Bulstrode, Rosamond or Lydgate, becomes quite complex with regard to Dorothea, with whose consciousness – and blindness – the narration is much more consonant than it is with that of any other character. The distance between narratorial consciousness and figural consciousness is quite large two paragraphs earlier when the narrator remarks that Dorothea was ‘innocently’ embittering her husband; but now narratorial irony seems to take the side of her innocence in the observation that ‘she was blind . . . to many things obvious to others’, since it echoes Celia’s earlier words to Dorothea and thus evokes the likes of Celia and Mrs Cadwallader as the ‘others’ in question – persons who perceive accurately by virtue of their pragmatic smallness of soul. The blindness referred to here ought to be Dorothea’s impercipience with regard to her husband; yet by means of the contrast with the knowingness of these ‘others’, the narrator evokes the blindness resulting from purity of purpose. No doubt, since the narrator knows more than Dorothea, there is some irony directed toward the purity, at this point in Dorothea’s moral education, of her purpose, but sympathetic irony in view of Dorothea’s consistent struggle toward the good. Ironic or not, however, it is evident that in the absence of full knowledge such as that to which the narrator is theoretically privy, sympathetic feeling is a loose cannon that can discharge in any direction, with random ethical results. And there remains the suspicion that, behind the screen of Dorothea’s ruminations about justice and self-denial, what is really driving her, not sublimated but repressed, is the feeling for Ladislaw. For her feelings at this moment ‘concentrate’ on the picture of Will’s Aunt Julia, ‘so like a living face that she knew’, who was cut off from family and inheritance ‘only because she had chosen a man who was poor!’ (272). Nevertheless, the misfires of Dorothea’s sympathy can be understood as part of her struggle toward consciousness; the doctrine of sympathy is not an algorithm and can only come to its fullness at the end of a thorny path. Doesn’t Dorothea in the end come to a full sympathetic apprehension of Casaubon’s weakness and pain and as a consequence overcome her last shred of ‘egoism’, when push comes to shove forgetting completely about Ladislaw? Here too the moral ideology of the narrator falls apart on close examination. For the ‘sympathy’ that leads Dorothea to submit at last to her husband’s desire (a dubious enough ethical result in itself) is difficult or

­94    Spirit Becomes Matter impossible to distinguish from the ‘pity’ that lacerates him as badly as or even worse than contempt could do and which is the ‘remoteness’ into which Dorothea travels in proportion as her regard for him decreases and her perception of his internal reality grows. ‘Consider that he was a man whose soul shrank from pity,’ the narrator enjoins, and every insight we get into Casaubon confirms that this shrinking belongs to his deepest nature. I earlier articulated this paradox of the doctrine of sympathy: that Dorothea overcomes her own egoism in order to submit to the egoism of Casaubon. Now we are confronted with a second, even more intractable paradox: that, as a consequence of Casaubon’s absence of passion and doubt of his own ability, ‘his experience was of that pitiable kind that shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known’; yet Dorothea develops, precisely, pity for him by coming to know him as he really is. And the narrator, apparently not quite in command of the irony of the remark, adds after the description I have just quoted, and in obedience to the doctrine of sympathy, ‘For my part I am very sorry for him’ (206). Of course the pity of the narrator or the reader cannot violate a fictional character’s reserve, but there is a potential confusion of perspectives here that must be carefully negotiated. The narrator is purveying to the reader a practice of pity that this narrator exemplifies, and Dorothea is supposed to carry out this same practice. But somehow the inoffensive character of uninvolved, purely theoretical pity appears to lull the narrator into not perceiving the fatal character for ‘real’ pity (i.e. the pity internal to the story) of the paradox inscribed in calling pitiable and hence pitying a character who ‘fears most of all that it should be known’ and for whom pity is an unbearable violation of selfhood. There is a whole thematics of benefaction, of benefits said to be freely given and therefore as imposing the obligation of gratitude – in fact, an extensive problematic of the gift that communicates with that of sympathy – in the relation between Casaubon and Ladislaw. Here as in Jane Eyre it is a case of the Christian gift that is intruded on an unwilling receiver out of motives that are ideologised as impeccable; but Eliot’s commitment to the doctrine of sympathy makes her fall short of the kind of hardminded insight into the physio-psychology of aggressivity and vengefulness behind gift-giving that Charlotte Brontë in fair measure shares with her sister Emily. Dorothea for her part persists in her pity that Casaubon cannot bear, and when she falls back from pity and begins to plot vengeance against him for his mistreatment of her the narrator treats this falling back as an ethical lapse (312–13). She repeatedly conquers the impulse to retaliate against him, but it is this very self-conquest that is most offensive

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to Casaubon, who perceives that ‘her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts’ (306). Casaubon, understandably, wants Dorothea to be devoted and submissive because she believes in him, not because she is doing penitence for not believing in him; so the more virtuously Dorothea overcomes herself on his behalf, the more she torments him with the gift of her devotion. Nevertheless, hard on the heels of the explanation of this terrible dilemma, we read of yet another self-conquest on the part of Dorothea, and one that has such a moving result that it might well veil from our eyes its ethical dubiousness, marking as it does Dorothea’s nascent submission to the ‘dead hand’ of her husband. Dorothea, conquering the ‘desire to strike’, waits in the dark by Casaubon’s study until he, emerging, greets her with a ‘kind quiet melancholy’ that leaves Dorothea ‘with something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature’, and they walk away together (313–14). This scene, in which pity is triumphant (and which is one of the most moving in the book), seems to mark a new turn in their relationship, for Casaubon now begins to trust Dorothea to help him with his work. It seems as though Dorothea’s self-sacrifice is finally beginning to overcome the problem of missing spontaneity, for her husband, ‘with all his jealousy and suspicion, had gathered implicit trust in the integrity of her promises, and her power of devoting herself to her idea of the right and best’ (349). But lest it seem that an ethically satisfying balance has now been struck, Dorothea’s reward for demonstrating this integrity is that Casaubon now asks her to bind herself after his death to his useless scholarly labours, a demand that strikes Dorothea, and most readers, with horror. We are now in the most fascinatingly problematic moment of the entire novel, the moment at which the doctrine of sympathy, which has now been translated without residue into a doctrine of pity, confronts – or almost confronts – its own most severe consequences. Does Eliotscriptor really mean for us to think that Dorothea ought, according to the law of pity, to bind herself for life to the pursuit of a project that is not hers and the complete futility of which she, along with the narrator and the reader, quite clearly perceives? This seems too monstrous a supposition to credit, and indeed death must come, deus ex machina, to forestall such an outcome – yet not before Dorothea has once more conquered her own desire and resolved to give Casaubon the answer he wants. His death spares Dorothea the consequences of her decision, but she has gone all the way with the moral ideology to which she trusts herself. Why has Eliot pressed her doctrine to such a ghoulish pass – in

­96    Spirit Becomes Matter order then to let her protagonist escape in a purely accidental fashion? Ladislaw’s earlier remark about Minotaurs who devour the sweetest women finds an application at this point that not even he imagined. Is this situation constructed to show that pity is not just a matter of one’s convenience; that it is precisely when the fullest price with regard to one’s own ‘egoism’ has to be paid that real goodness is going to show itself? Even if the plot plays bait and switch at this point so that the novel can continue, isn’t Dorothea’s self-conquest here part of the moral education that will enable her towards the end of the novel to overcome her ‘jealous offended pride’ in order to render aid and comfort to Rosamond? In that case, the contradictions and apparent incoherencies I have been tracing would be not objections to the doctrine of sympathy, but reminders of how much darkness and pain there is on the road to the fullest ethical being, and Dorothea’s sublimation would emerge triumphant. The love that is finally consummated between her and Ladislaw would then be the hard-won, fully ethical product of Dorothea’s protracted effort of self-overcoming; and the authority of the narrator’s moralism over the representation would be preserved.

Weakness or Strength? On this reading, then, the ultimate validity of the doctrine of sympathy rests on the goodness of Dorothea, and her goodness itself is guaranteed by her unwavering adherence to the doctrine of sympathy, which enables her to sublimate passions that would motivate other people in an unsublimated form. Hence critics’ frustrated sense that the circle of morality closes around the depiction of Dorothea in a way that is impervious to the accidents of personal or social history. Yet, along another axis of this depiction, an entirely different picture of Dorothea emerges – a picture that cannot be fully credited as long as the reader remains under the illusion of closure generated by the doctrine of sympathy. Along this axis, Dorothea’s sympathy is depicted not as the self-validating rule of a goodness that is so good that it must inevitably find its way, but as the only instrument of which her will to power can avail itself in a world that hems her in from all directions. This is the tortuous, torturous path of ascetic will to power, which I now begin to trace.8 Dorothea’s decision to submit to Casaubon’s last will is supposed to be meritorious, the triumph of pity over egoism, yet it is suggested that it is the product of weakness rather than strength:

Subincision of the Ethical Subject (Middlemarch)    97 she was too weak, too full of dread at the thought of inflicting a keen-edged blow on her husband, to do anything but submit completely. (352) Neither law nor the world’s opinion compelled her to this – only her husband’s nature and her own compassion . . . She could not smite the stricken soul that entreated hers. If that were weakness, Dorothea was weak. (353)

Perhaps if Dorothea had but the strength she would strike that very ‘lamed creature’ whom she had earlier sublimely spared a ‘keen-edged blow’ that would finish him off. Here, as elsewhere, it is hard to tell where Dorothea’s voice leaves off and the narrator’s takes over, but it would be reasonable to conclude that the initial, unqualified judgement of weakness is Dorothea’s, whereas the narrator, standing firm for sympathy, raises the concluding doubt as to whether such goodness can be called weakness. On this reading, it is good to be weak, if weakness means that one does not assert the claims of one’s own flourishing life where these claims would frustrate the pitiable lamed egoism of another. From the perspective of the narrator’s moral ideology it is doubtful whether this is correctly called weakness. Interestingly, on the first occasion in which Dorothea had overcome her ‘desire to strike’ at Casaubon, the narrator had described this overcoming as achieved by a great expenditure of energy, an energy that by a surprising analogy was said to be as great as that which would ‘animate a crime’ (313). In that first case, however, Dorothea had been in the grip of a passion of vengeance, aroused by Casaubon’s unresponsiveness to her pity, that had to be overcome; ‘pity was overthrown’ (313) by her anger, but the anger itself was rooted in Dorothea’s indignation at Casaubon’s rejection of her pity and therefore had an ideological warrant. The righteousness that motivates her pity thus, in that earlier scene, also motivates the anger that negates it (very much as in Jane Eyre’s reaction to her dying aunt’s refusal of her ‘ruth’); the same dialectic then re-establishes pity as the negation of this negation. In the case of the promise Casaubon wishes to extract from her, however, the motive of pity is enlisted entirely on the side of submission, and there is no ideological point d’appui for Dorothea’s self-affirmation against him – a self-affirmation to which, by the logic of ascetic will to power that regulates it, Dorothea can only attain in the mode either of pity (which in this case, however, spells the end of her self-assertion) or of righteous anger.

Pleasures of Self-Sacrifice The fundamental riddle of the novel concerning Dorothea’s physio-­ psychological economy is neatly summed up in the remark by her

­98    Spirit Becomes Matter shrewd sister Celia that Dorothea ‘likes giving up’ – to which Dorothea in good ascetic fashion replies that ‘if that were true’ her giving-up would be ‘self-indulgence, not self-mortification’ (13–14). Celia’s formulation lays bare the paradox in the hedonic economy of ascetic will, according to which virtue would consist of not liking to do what one likes, or liking to do what one does not like, and Dorothea rejects this paradox on the basis of the orthodox philosophical reasoning that one gives up what is ‘agreeable’ not for a yet more agreeable feeling but for good ethical reasons.9 In one sense Celia is absolutely correct; in another she quite misunderstands her sister. The notion of ‘liking to do X’ is too weak to capture the most intense, complex and strenuous satisfactions of selfhood, and Dorothea justifiably hears Celia as accusing her of mere self-indulgence. The notion of self-indulgence involves a weak conception of pleasure in self, according to which one would not take too much trouble, expend too much energy, or incur any significant amount of displeasure as a concomitant of one’s pleasure. But this conception is so weak that it cannot account even for the ordinary athlete’s drive to self-mastery (‘no pain, no gain’), and it is wildly inadequate to an organism like Dorothea, whose quantum of will to power is, like that of St John Rivers in Jane Eyre, so strong that it requires to be joined to the largest enterprise she can imagine as its outlet. However, once we understand Dorothea’s drive and desire in their proper proportions (disproportionate as they are to her actual capabilities), it becomes relevant once again to consider her pleasure in the light cast by Celia. Dorothea ‘likes giving up’ in the sense that giving up is the ascetic modality through which her will to power finds a route to satisfaction. Because Dorothea can exercise her will only through the channels of ascetic ideology, two opposite tendencies of the exercise of power operate on her simultaneously, and she is at once submissive and dominating. The level at which she dominates is most deeply manifested in her struggle with Casaubon, the representation of which (like the account of Gwendolen and Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda) anticipates the most powerful work of D. H. Lawrence and is one of the great triumphs of George Eliot’s art. In the shadows of the terrible intimacy of marriage is played out a largely subterranean battle that lacerates the souls of both husband and wife as the authority of Casaubon begins almost immediately to be hollowed out by the relentless boring of Dorothea’s ascetic self-assertion. Unlike Rosamond, who plays out a parallel drama with Lydgate, Dorothea does not desire (at least in any straightforward way) to be master over Casaubon; on the contrary, by submitting to him, she wishes to unite herself to his intellectual power; and she fantasises this

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power as so great that it will put her in a position to ‘learn everything’ and ‘to see life by the same light great men have seen it by’ (20). But the further development of their relation shows Casaubon to be the victim of Dorothea’s fantasy of submission, based as this fantasy is on a vision of Casaubon’s greatness (and of the usefulness to her own project of power of that greatness) that Casaubon cannot sustain. Of course Casaubon has a complementary fantasy of Dorothea’s inferiority and submissiveness, without which Dorothea’s fantasy would have no effect. But he quickly realises his mistake, and from the moment of this realisation the struggle of will between them assumes a fascinatingly inverted form. In a variant of the old joke about the masochist and the sadist, Dorothea says ‘Let me serve you!’ and Casaubon says ‘No!’. Because Casaubon instinctively feels that Dorothea is the more powerful organism, her demand that he make an instrument of her is an unsustainable inversion of the order of will to power and is therefore terrifying to Casaubon, who learns in a series of traumatic confrontations with her that he must not let her will and consciousness come into too close proximity to his, and especially not to the hidden secret of his (lack of) power. Like the ‘writing’ of the Nambikwara chief in Levi-Strauss’s fable, Casaubon’s manuscripts are a source of authority that will not bear decoding, and every increase in Dorothea’s access to them means a decrease in his stature, as she becomes a ‘cruel outward accuser . . . in the shape of a wife’, a ‘spy watching everything with a malign power of inference’ (149). Since Dorothea’s perception of his insufficiency incorporates that of Ladislaw, by which her own perception has been so much influenced, she becomes the representative, within Casaubon’s very sanctum, of the social outside from whose perception he has so carefully hidden himself.

How Dorothea Destroys Casaubon The inverted nature of the struggle between Casaubon and Dorothea shows itself from their first mild conflict a few weeks after marriage, before Dorothea has begun to doubt Casaubon’s ability, but in which her irritability of self-sacrificing predominance already shows itself in its new, connubial form. She becomes angry when Casaubon implies that she might have needs of her own that she would not ‘willingly give up’: ‘You will have many lonely hours, Dorothea, for I shall be constrained to make the utmost use of my time during our stay in Rome, and I should feel more at liberty if you had a companion.’

­100    Spirit Becomes Matter   The words ‘I should feel more at liberty’ grated on Dorothea. For the first time in speaking to Mr Casaubon she coloured from annoyance.   ‘You must have misunderstood me very much,’ she said, ‘if you think I should not enter into the value of your time – if you think that I should not willingly give up whatever interfered with your using it to the best purpose.’ (64)

Nothing could better illustrate the nature of Dorothea’s ascetic physiopsychological economy than this scene. On one side, her complete, unreserved willingness to sacrifice her own desire or pleasure on behalf of her husband; on the other hand, the feeling of wounded pride (‘she coloured from annoyance’) and the consequent arousal of her aggressivity, against the person for whom she proposes to sacrifice herself, at his failing to perceive the dimensions of her unselfishness. After the first open flare-up in Rome (148–51), they manage to repress their conflicts until the occasion at Lowick when Casaubon, hearing from Dorothea that Ladislaw has written, expresses with some severity his disinclination to any further visits from the younger man; Dorothea then explodes with rage. The style of the passage in which her reaction is described is somewhere between free indirect discourse or, in Dorrit Cohn’s more precise terminology, ‘narrated internal monologue’ and what Cohn calls ‘psychonarration’; that is, it represents Dorothea’s slant on the experience, partly in Dorothea’s idiom, partly in the narrator’s.10 It also strikes that note of dry, intellectual humour that is so frequent in this novel and for which, such is its subtlety, Eliot has been given so little credit: ‘. . . this ill-tempered anticipation that she could desire visits which might be disagreeable to her husband, this gratuitous defence of himself against selfish complaint on her part, was too sharp a sting to be meditated on until after it had been resented’ (208). She flashes out at him for his ‘false supposition’ about her feeling, and Casaubon, deeply shaken, tries to make a graceful exit from the scene by returning to his writing, but ‘his hand trembled so much that the words seemed to be written in an unknown character’ (209). Dorothea leaves the letters from Ladislaw unread on her husband’s writing table, rejecting them ‘as we hurl away any trash towards which we seem to have been suspected of mean cupidity’, not ‘in the least’ perceiving ‘the subtle sources of her husband’s bad temper about these letters’. (Notice that Dorothea in the midst of this power struggle retains no shred of sentiment regarding Ladislaw’s letters.) Then Dorothea sets about her own work, ‘and her hand did not tremble; on the contrary, in writing out the quotations which had been given to her the day before, she felt that she was forming her letters beautifully, and it seemed to her that she saw the construction of the Latin she was copying, and which she was beginning

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to understand, more clearly than usual. In her indignation there was a sense of superiority . . .’ (209). Can the lineaments of will to power at work be any more clearly traced than this? The steadiness of her hand is constituted agonistically: the conflict makes Casaubon’s hands tremble while it increases the ‘firmness of stroke’ of Dorothea’s. Just as important, this physical expression of power manifests itself in the symbolic order as the beginning of a mastery of Latin, which in 1830 would have still been packed with cultural power. It is the door to full cultural competence of the intellectual sort Dorothea desires (but will not in the end attain), the indispensable supplement to the impoverished education Dorothea has received – and thus the essential tool she needs if she is to pursue intellectual independence from Casaubon. And she registers the sense of all this consciously or semi-consciously (again, it is impossible to tell where Dorothea’s consciousness leaves off and the narrator’s takes over): ‘In her indignation there was a sense of superiority.’ At this point, then, the stronger organism is beginning to overwhelm the weaker, psychologically and physiologically. Dorothea, firm in the ideological purity of her ascetic intention, feels perfectly justified in taking pleasure in this moment of ascendancy over her husband, a sadistic or vengeful pleasure for which (and this is a crucial indicator of her physio-psychological economy) she readily sacrifices that promised by Ladislaw’s letters or the prospect of his visit. The shock to Casaubon is so powerful that within half an hour he has his first heart attack, an event that fatefully shifts the course of the power struggle between them, since from that moment on Dorothea’s superiority is too great and she can no longer allow herself to strike out at him because he is too weak to sustain her blow. Now pity becomes her primary motivation toward him; I have already recounted the scene in which she conquers her wish to hurt him and they begin a melancholy rapprochement. According to the doctrine of sympathy, this would be part of the thorny road Dorothea must walk on the way to sainthood; but from the standpoint of her will to power this is nothing but a new and worse phase in the hemming-in of her energy that she has endured from the beginning, a phase that, ironically, is constituted by Casaubon’s complete, and therefore suffocating, acceptance of the selfsacrifice that up to that point Dorothea had projected as the satisfaction of her will to power. From the moment of Casaubon’s heart attack, the process of reversal of power relations between him and Dorothea is complete: from being the dominant partner, through the struggle for supremacy in which he has gradually been subdued, Casaubon has come to the limit point of

­102    Spirit Becomes Matter weakness; but at this point a new reversal takes place as Casaubon’s weakness now becomes strength – the means by which, under the ideological rule of pity that is so deeply ingrained in Dorothea, he can dominate her anew. The parallel death-struggle of Lydgate and Rosamond, which incidentally also ends with the early death of the husband, similarly turns on the triumph of ‘weakness’ over ‘strength’: Lydgate thinks of her ‘as if she were an animal of another and feebler species. Nevertheless [but isn’t it for that very reason?] she had mastered him’ (489). In the overall economy of forces in this novel, then, Dorothea has to destroy Casaubon, and does in fact destroy him. The notion that Dorothea destroys Casaubon is medically plausible, given the constant, severe stress to which the marriage subjects him, as well as consistent with a pattern in Eliot’s late work according to which repressive, or even merely inconvenient, husbands have to be killed off, whether murdered by someone else, as in Romola; perhaps negligently and wilfully allowed to die by the wife, as in Daniel Deronda (which provides perhaps the supreme portrait in English literature of the struggle of will to power within marriage); or directly murdered by her, as is the husband of Lydgate’s French actress in Middlemarch. In terms of the hypothesis according to which I am at present reading the novel, the death of Casaubon would be the complete triumph over and appropriation of the weaker by the stronger organism, according to the logic of the text that works itself out in terms of will to power, and in contradiction to the doctrine of sympathy in terms of which the narrator attempts to contain events.

Ascetic Eros Dorothea’s flow of selfhood is defined in its essential identity by its aim at an ideal good; yet her ethical development is the effect of the unfolding of her will to power, and her self-conquest and exercise of sympathy are the expression of a quantum of energy that must act on the outside. The aim at the good is the instrument by which this imperative of selfhood is carried out; hence the ‘inverted’ character of the power struggle between Dorothea and Casaubon. Hence also the peculiar character of her relation to Ladislaw. He attracts her desire by indicating to her that she can ‘rule beneficently’ in his heart; but, given the ascetic nature of her path to power, she can only enjoy this thought because the relation is consistent with her need to deny herself ordinary gratification. Her fierce, virginal assertion of selfhood accommodates

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the eroticised sympathy of her relation to Ladislaw under the concept of friendship, a powerful, ancient concept that was still in the nineteenth century strong enough to bend erotic energies to its ideological mould. As long as Dorothea retains any vision of continuing autonomy, she uses the thought of friendship to hold at bay the thought of him as a lover, not because she is ‘conventional’ or ‘sexually repressed’ but because to conceive of him as a lover would violate the ascetic economy that gives Dorothea her sense of distinction from other women and her intense feeling of inner life. This tortuously structured economy thus produces joy when she finds out that Will loves her but is going away, perhaps forever: Joy came first . . . – joy in the impression that it was really herself that Will loved and was renouncing [!] . . . They were parted all the same, but – Dorothea drew a deep breath and felt her strength return – she could think of him unrestrainedly . . . her consciousness had room to expand: her past was come back to her with larger interpretation. The joy was not the less – perhaps it was the more complete just then – because of the irrevocable parting; for there was no reproach . . . to imagine in any eye or from any lips. Anyone watching her might have seen that there was a fortifying thought within her . . . through all her feelings there ran this vein – ‘I was right to defend him.’ (464–5)

There follows the scene in which Dorothea in her coach drives past Ladislaw trudging along on foot, she ‘in a sort of exaltation’, he miserable and bitter, and she thinks that if they had had an earlier or a fuller understanding, then they could be ‘quite happy thinking of each other, though . . . forever parted’. We then learn through her narrated monologue that she could never dream of ‘defying’ her husband’s will, which the narrator presents as a concession to the weight of the world’s opinion; but it is remarkable that the habitually rebellious Dorothea does not at all chafe at this restriction from outside. The necessity that she renounce Will is in fact the condition of possibility of her present exaltation: it enables her to ‘give up’ once again in a way that she ‘likes’ while yet seeing this giving up not as her choice of pleasure but as something she has an obligation to do. (Once again, as in Jane Eyre, society’s injunction of virtue is both a constraint on, and the instrument of, a woman’s will to self.) Her joy later subsides into a ‘delicious though sad repose’ (566). It is very late in the story, just prior to the fateful visit to the Lydgates that will lead her to believe Ladislaw loves Rosamond, yet she is still content ‘that the chief pleasures of her tenderness should lie in memory’, while ‘the idea of marriage came to her solely as a repulsive proposition’ because she does not in any way associate it with Ladislaw but

­104    Spirit Becomes Matter only with the suitor imagined by Brooke and Mrs Cadwallader. The idealising trends of her imagination focus on the fact that her relation with Ladislaw is ‘perfect and without blemish’, and her feeling for him is intensified into a ‘more thorough glow’ by the growing social opprobrium against Ladislaw, which activates on his behalf the ‘active force of antagonism’ in Dorothea against injustice (the precision with which Eliot analyses the asceticism of her pleasure is breathtaking). Thus, as regards Ladislaw, everything at this point is, bizarrely, as perfect as it can be for Dorothea. Her pulse, which normally pounds so hard, has found repose in a condition that, for the moment at least, fully satisfies her will to autonomous selfhood, since she is able to satisfy at once her need to hold sway over Will’s heart, her need to virtuously renounce him, and her need to extend sympathy toward him as victim of injustice, while also, simultaneously, discharging her charge of irritable antagonism against the agents of that injustice – all of this in relation to a perfected, interiorised image of Will of which she is the keeper and defender, and which is consonant with the altruistic purity of her own subjectivity at which her ascetic will aims.

Dorothea to the Rescue Nevertheless, precisely because this interiorised image of Will so perfectly satisfies the requirements of Dorothea’s ascetic will, and in a way that seems to be entirely within her control, it becomes the means of destabilising the autonomy of which this image is an instrument. Once she is so wholly and satisfyingly invested in this idealised, interiorised image of him, she becomes susceptible to the violent opening out of her interiority that comes from the violation of that image by the influx of reality.11 The reality is not, of course, quite what she thinks it is. Walking into Rosamond’s drawing-room ‘she saw Will Ladislaw: close by him and turned towards him with a flushed tearfulness which gave a new brilliancy to her face sat Rosamond . . . while Will leaning towards her clasped both her upraised hands in his and spoke with low-toned fervour’ (568). As we learn later from Rosamond, Ladislaw was in fact telling her at this moment that he could never love her because he loved someone else. But Dorothea’s devastated reaction to the scene is not a simple misinterpretation. As Dorothea’s own original reaction when she first discovered they were keeping company showed, Ladislaw had been treading the edge of propriety with Rosamond from the beginning. We are now informed that he has ‘enjoyed a caressing friendship’ with

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Rosamond, and it has involved him so intimately with her that in the moments after the lacerating scene of their discovery by Dorothea he is pressed by the ‘foreboding’ that ‘his life might come to be enslaved by this helpless woman who had thrown herself upon him’ (571). He does not love her or even think much of her, but his fear of being enslaved by her shows that his behaviour has carelessly slid him into a delicate entanglement with her. Because Dorothea believes in Will’s goodness, and thinks he loves her and not Rosamond, she is able to hold the unacceptable social meaning, and the possible emotional implications, of Will’s comportment with Rosamond at bay until she is overwhelmed by the sight of him holding her hands and speaking fervently to her, at which point it bursts calamitously over her. Even if Ladislaw does not love Rosamond, there is enough reality in the second scene witnessed by Dorothea to rend the ascetic, self-delighting monad of her selfhood with unassimilable exteriority. Yet even in her paroxysm of grief at the apparent loss of Ladislaw and of ‘her woman’s pride of reigning in his memory’, she is lacerated by that rage that always flares up in this imperious woman when those around her prove inferior to her imaginings. The narrated interior monologue brings out the flavour of the self-prizing that drives her self-denial: Why had he come obtruding his life into hers, hers that might have been whole enough without him? [NB: this is a crucial point; there is not necessarily any ‘lack’ in Dorothea.] Why had he brought his cheap regard and his lip-born words to her who had nothing paltry to give in exchange? . . . Why had he not stayed among the crowd of whom she asked nothing – but only prayed that they might be less contemptible? (576)

Ladislaw, who has under false pretences penetrated Dorothea’s autarky, is here pictured as a representative of ‘the crowd’ – a Trojan horse for the motley sociality that irritates and ultimately baffles Dorothea’s will to self. Even though the force of the violation Dorothea feels is also, for the same reason, the full flowering of erotic passion in her, she makes one last stab at the recovery of her internal autonomy. By the time her long night of agony ends she has got over her paroxysm, her will flowing into a new channel of ascetic self-overcoming. ‘Was she alone in that scene? Was it her event only? She forced herself to think of it as bound up with another woman’s life’ (577). Understood in terms of the narrator’s moral ideology, this is a crucial moment in Dorothea’s movement toward genuine, egoism-overcoming sympathy. Yet this same narrator provides, as always, an account of the economy of will to power behind this moment:

­106    Spirit Becomes Matter All the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate’s lot, and this young marriage union which, like her own, seemed to have its hidden as well as evident troubles – all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as in the day of our ignorance. (577)

The power of knowledge is what she had sought in marrying Casaubon, though at that time she thought such power was resident in books; now she finds it, unlooked for, in that very experience that has rent her heart. And as soon as she finds it, she begins to reconstitute along new lines the fantasy of sovereignty she had indulged with regard to Ladislaw. And what sort of crisis might not this be in three lives whose contact with hers laid an obligation on her as if they had been supplicants bearing the sacred branch? The objects of her rescue were not to be sought out by her fancy: they were chosen for her. She yearned toward the perfect Right, that it might make a throne within her, and rule her errant will. (577)

The language of this passage is jarringly stiff. Ladislaw and Rosamond become ‘supplicants bearing the sacred branch’; Dorothea wants ‘perfect Right’ to make its ‘throne’ within her and rule her ‘errant will’. And the quality of the language here is of crucial importance, because this passage bears a peculiarly heavy artistic burden. It represents the climax and turning point of Dorothea’s major ethical crisis, the moment at which, according to the apparent design of the plot, she makes her definitive transition away from self and toward the Other. But these words scarcely seem aesthetically equal to the moment. If we read this as psychonarration and attribute the wording to the narrator, and if, further, we assume that the wording with which Eliot-scriptor provides the narrator reflects her own best understanding of Dorothea’s turn, then at this crucial moment Eliot’s art has failed to rise to the challenge. On the other hand, if we read this as free indirect rendering of Dorothea’s own interior deliberations, this lets the novelist a bit off the hook, because the words reflect the sometimes rather pompous character of Dorothea’s self-relation, the fact that she is a relentlessly serious person, without humour or irony, allowing only the most sublime notions to enter her priggishly clean consciousness. But this doesn’t let Eliot entirely off the hook, either, because now the artistic problem becomes, precisely, the way in which Dorothea’s sublimity is conceived within the scriptorial design of the novel from beginning to end. According to the present reading, the fact that Dorothea allows only the most elevated moral notions into her consciousness, that she is so resolutely resistant, as her sister tells her early on, to see what other

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people see, is what has got her into so much trouble, and specifically into the crisis she is now working through. She is insufficiently perceptive of the ironic complexity of human affairs, or of her own involvement in them. But now the solution of her crisis is presented as the leap into a yet higher level of sublimity, as though a snap of the fingers could lift Dorothea clear at last of all this ethical muddle. No doubt if it were possible to let perfect Right rule one’s will, the ethical subject would be in the clear; but Dorothea has wanted that from the beginning, and what the novel has scrupulously depicted is how this pure wish gets dragged into the web of human action. Yet now this wish is being evoked as its own solution. Does the novelist, then, mean for us to believe that, after having undergone a rigorous process of moral education, Dorothea is at last ready to actually let perfect Right rule her will? If so, then Middlemarch at this moment decisively renounces the physio-psychological naturalism that drives its most trenchant insights into moral psychology. But there is another possibility. Perhaps Eliot is keeping some ironic distance from these thoughts, the same distance that she has maintained from Dorothea throughout the novel. The entire novel, after all, will end ironically, with Dorothea’s grand moral striving reduced to the role of wife and helpmeet. In that case, this moment would be just typical Dorothea, on the same level with her thoughts near the beginning of the novel in which she thinks that if she married Casaubon, she would ‘learn everything’ because it would be her ‘duty’. Disappointingly for this thesis, however, the narrator does not give any indication of ironic distance at this moment and specifically in regard to the matter at hand, her ‘rescue’ of Ladislaw and Rosamond. As I read this passage, Eliotscriptor stands more or less fully behind the archaic, quasi-mythical formulation of ethical duty seated on its throne. Eliot’s persona as ‘sybil in the gloom’ at this point, it appears, has usurped the place of the artist. Underneath the surface aspect of this language, however, there is something more interesting, something that manifests the power of Eliot’s art even when at another level it falters. For the archaic imagery that is inadequate as solution of the ethical muddle represents the evolution into a new register of a crucial element of that muddle: the fantasy of erotic sovereignty over Ladislaw that Dorothea had earlier indulged. ‘I shall have a little kingdom, then, where I shall give laws’ (269), Dorothea had said to him at the beginning of their involvement; and when she thought they would never meet again she still maintained the fantasy of ‘reigning in his memory’ (576). Now she no longer sees herself, precisely, as enthroned, yet there is still a throne in the picture, and even though not Dorothea but ‘perfect Right’ occupies it, Dorothea,

­108    Spirit Becomes Matter transmogrified into the power to which ‘supplicants’ come as ‘objects of her rescue’, possesses by delegation the sovereignty of that throne. Her power is moreover even greater than what she earlier fantasised, for now it has the full warrant of the doctrine of sympathy and self-sacrifice behind it, and she now holds in her power not only Ladislaw but also his supposed new girlfriend. Thus what we see in the ‘errant will’ passage is Dorothea’s fundamental impulse to domination preserved, spiritualised, aufgehoben according to the logic of ascetic will to power, which prescribes that it is not I but the Lord, the Good, the Right that legislates; I merely carry out its dictates. We saw this same logic in St John’s attempt to appropriate Jane Eyre as his wife; it is ascetic-priest logic. Soon a revitalised Dorothea is on her way to ‘save Rosamond’ (579). Seen from the perspective of power, what is so striking about the subsequent scene is not how completely Dorothea gives herself up to the call of the Other, but how completely Rosamond is engulfed in the vortex of Dorothea’s vast, overwhelming, selfhood. As Dorothea enters the Lydgate house, Rosamond perceives her as a woman who ‘predominated in all things concerning her’ (580), and shortly thereafter, Dorothea’s large, powerful hands clasp her own ‘little’ hands with ‘gentle motherliness’, as she speaks to her in a predominantly assertoric and imperative mood in which even her questions are framed: ‘You will not think me too troublesome . . . It will cheer you . . . will it not? . . . You will like to know . . . You will let me speak of this without thinking that I take a liberty?’ (581) ‘But you will forgive him.’ (582)

I don’t underrate the power of this scene, which, despite everything I am saying, remains deeply moving. There is no calculation in Dorothea’s behaviour or speech; she is genuinely in the grip of overwhelming emotion and ‘self-forgetful ardour’; which means, from a naturalistic standpoint, that she has found a perfect ascetic channel for her immense physio-psychological energy (582). The contrast between the state of her internal economy and that of Jane Eyre when Rochester threatens to rape her is instructive; whereas Jane can control her tears, releasing them only in view of their rhetorical effect, Dorothea manages to master hers with a fearful struggle, yet with an effect of pathos that is greater than tears could convey: ‘The emotion had wrought itself more and more into her utterance, till the tones might have gone to one’s very marrow, like a low cry from some suffering creature in the darkness’ (582). The fact that sympathy and self-sacrifice may be modalities of expression of will to power does not mean that they are any the less real, or potentially (if

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somewhat randomly) valuable, for that reason; it only means that their nature is different from what the sentimental veil of moral ideology makes it appear. Dorothea’s genuine self-forgetfulness does not alter the fact that it is her energy that completely dominates and defines the scene; nor does Eliot fail to keep us attuned to this fact. She masters her own tears, but the pathos in her voice causes Rosamond to break into a fit of ‘hysterical crying’ (581) as Rosamond is ‘taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own’ (584). So completely does Dorothea’s agency subordinate that of Rosamond that the reciprocating act of rescue Rosamond executes (her revelation of the fact that Ladislaw has spurned her advances to him), misunderstood by Dorothea as a ‘generous effort’ on Rosamond’s part, is, the narrator reveals, actually begun by Rosamond ‘under the subduing influence of Dorothea’s emotion’ and in the end amounts only to ‘a reflex of [Dorothea’s] own energy’ (585).

Beyond Dorothea Even Dorothea’s supposed culminating triumph over self, thus, manifests the ascendancy of Dorothea’s selfhood over the beings around her – and does so in a way that is explicitly marked by the narrator. We could trace a similar movement in Dorothea’s emotional and financial rescue of Lydgate; everything in the novel testifies to Dorothea’s tendency to predominate. The difference between Dorothea and the people around her, however, is not that she, as opposed to they, acts out of will to power, but that hers is more exigent, that she lacks an adequate cultural outlet for it, and that, in some measure making up for this lack, she is bigger, stronger, healthier and more beautiful than most people, and has a superior economic and social position, so that, despite lacking an education, she is able to ‘leverage’ her will to power in ways that others cannot. She is, nevertheless, doomed to fail in her project of self-assertion because of the contradiction internal to her ethic of self-sacrifice that I have traced in this chapter, the contradiction between her search for leverage on the external world, and her need to make her internal world immune from the social outside.

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Notes  1. Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 157–8. Shuttleworth’s reading of Eliot in terms of energy dynamics opens a radically different perspective on the influence of scientific thought on Eliot from that of Gillian Beer in her influential Darwin’s Plots (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Beer reads Middlemarch exclusively in terms of the movement ‘away from structure, to function and to history’ under the influence of Darwin and Bernard (151), making no mention of the flowering, following the discovery of the principle of conservation of energy in the 1840s, of the energy paradigm (on which see Shuttleworth and also Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 41–3).  2. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Riverside, 1956), p. 511. This edition cited throughout.   3. The object here is not to question the reality of sympathy, or of Dorothea’s exercise of sympathy, but to show that sympathy as it is portrayed in the novel cannot have the power to authenticate ethical motive and to guide right action that the narrator attributes to it. Thus the present analysis has an oblique relation to the current critical debate over sympathy in Eliot’s novels, on which see the Introduction, nn. 47, 48 and 49.  4. Cf. the argument, in some ways parallel to mine, of David Carroll, George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations: A Reading of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Carroll thinks Middlemarch consists of ‘two narratives in conflict’ (272), one of them ‘fictionalising in the lives of her protagonists some of the major myths articulating and controlling life in Victorian England’ (241) – in the case of Dorothea, the ‘saint’s life’ – the other testing these myths ‘to the point of radical definition or destruction’, by their contact either with each other or with ‘the social medium of Middlemarch’ (242).  5. D. A. Miller, Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 130, 165.   6. Daniel Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 122.   7. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 40.  8. For a quite different treatment of Nietzschean ascetic will in the novels of Eliot, with specific attention to Middlemarch, see William Myers, The Teaching of George Eliot (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984), pp. 183–206.   9. This reasoning, however, involves an additional, post-Kantian turn of the ascetic screw on Christian morality. Classical Christianity had no problem conceiving self-mortification as a higher, more perfect pleasure than could be derived from the measly sensual gratifications it sacrificed. 10. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

Subincision of the Ethical Subject (Middlemarch)    111 11. The structure of violation of an interiorised, ideal image of the Other that I describe here is closely related to structures of mourning I describe in Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), especially in Chapter 4, in a discussion of La Princesse de Clèves.

Chapter 3

What Things Cost in Middlemarch

Mainstream Middlemarch criticism has always been much taken with the vast social and historical panorama the novel presents. During the 1980s, however, as materialist historicism took hold in literary studies, an impressive cadre of critics, including John Kucich, Daniel Cottom, Deirdre David and Catherine Gallagher, developed the view that Eliot’s historical panorama was no more than background for the essential moral drama that was played out in the foreground. Eliot, these critics argued, placed all importance on the moral interiority of individuals, and saw the social context primarily as an impediment to these individuals’ attainment of moral autonomy. There is, thus, in her novels no genuinely dialectical interaction between the socio-political outside and the moral interiority of persons.1 Despite the weight and forcefulness of the materialist critique of Eliot, however, much of the best recent Middlemarch criticism has resumed the pursuit of older ‘humanist’ debates in abstraction from the fundamental, ethico-political questions that this critique had raised. These older debates – over the complexity of the real, the problem of interpretive perspective, and the possibility of authentic sympathy – all come back to the question of Eliot’s, and her characters’, moral probity as interpreters of reality, leaving untouched the question of the material determinants of these interpretations.2 While I disagree with the Left interpreters’ summary judgement of Middlemarch as ahistorical, I think their work remains an essential point of reference and disturber of the critical peace. Thus, the argument of the preceding chapter was framed in response to them, to begin showing the dialectical relation between Dorothea’s moral evolution and the social outside, and the present chapter is a continuation of this response. In Chapter 2, my argument remained at the level of intersubjectivity. To respond adequately to the substance of the Left critique of Eliot, it remains to show that Eliot also grasped the historico-political context of the psycho-physiologies at

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the centre of Middlemarch, and did so in a consequentially materialist way. As a female member of the country gentry, Dorothea’s moral consciousness has been almost hermetically insulated from the impact of political and economic reality; thus the way in which this reality conditions the nature of her moral intentionality cannot be deciphered by focusing primarily on her consciousness, as I have done so far. Only consideration of the conceptual structure of the novel as a whole makes it possible to grasp the way in which all the major characters are placed in relation to their socio-historical context. There is an essential clue to the deciphering of this structure in the words with which Dorothea near the end of the novel sums up her reasons for marrying Ladislaw: ‘I will learn what everything costs.’ This remark indicates what the sublimities of her moral idealism come to in the end. It comes at a culminating moment in the novel, and directly counterpoints the ‘I should learn everything then’ which had motivated her to marry Casaubon. Its significance for political economy is patent: what things cost is the hinge between the labour process and what today we call the ‘consumer’, via the mediation of market forces. The city gentry, who are bourgeois in the strict sense of the term, are directly enmeshed in this reality, but Dorothea’s class or class fraction, the country gentry, shares the aristocratic disdain for it, because the base of their wealth, like that of the aristocracy, is land. Thus the distance of her consciousness from the economic ‘base’ has been vast; but now, married to Ladislaw, deprived of the insulating layer of great wealth, as the manager of a household, she will have to count the cost of everything. The thread of her connection with Ladislaw thus leads us back, via this remark, into the structure of socio-political reflection in Middlemarch.3 Ladislaw is in his physio-psychological economy antithetical to the ascetic type that is central to Eliot’s work, and to which Dorothea, along with Felix Holt, Savonarola and Daniel Deronda, belongs. Ladislaw is a hedonist, in the philosophical sense of the term – one who feels that his own pleasure is his best guide for how he ought to channel his energy. This aspect of his being seems to contribute little to his allure for the terminally ascetic Dorothea, yet it determines his choice of life as a partial outsider, which does in turn draw Dorothea to him, and precisely for ascetic reasons – most importantly because her liaison with this socially questionable figure requires her to give up Casaubon’s inheritance. The erotic allure Ladislaw holds for Dorothea is of the type defined by Deleuze and Guattari in the first volume of Anti-Oedipus: it emanates from what he represents in terms of his socio-economic positioning. He is more or less bourgeois in his upbringing, level of education,

­114    Spirit Becomes Matter manners and social ambience; and all of this is necessary for him to be an eligible erotic object for Dorothea, who is not about to fall in love with a Heathcliff. But he is also an orphan, rootless, partly a foreigner in blood and education, penniless and with no prospect of inheritance, an aesthete, and in his ethos a sort of gypsy or perhaps, as is suggested at one point, a part-Jew. To sum it all up, as the narrator explains, Ladislaw sees himself as ‘belonging to no class’ (338). All of these marks of marginality contribute to the glamour that attracts Dorothea to him. Both Ladislaw’s physio-psychology and the kind of life to which it drives him distinguish him very sharply from Casaubon; but of far more consequence is the fact that they distinguish him from the man with whom Henry James and others have thought Dorothea should have been matched in the end: Lydgate. This is crucial to the overall design of the political novel’s conceptual structure, because Lydgate’s ethico-socio-­ positioning forms a triangle with those of Dorothea and Ladislaw. Lydgate, who scoffs at reform, is in thrall to the same quasi-aristocratic class ideology as Dorothea, which dictates indifference to what things cost, but unlike her he has no ascetic drive to escape from this condition; and he is the antitype of Ladislaw, who takes pleasure in being an outsider, has no fear of poverty, and devotes himself to the cause of reform. The pre-Ladislaw Dorothea can afford to be indifferent to economic reality; but Lydgate can’t, because he has not the means, and yet he remains so anyway. In his case, then, class ideology is ‘active’, whereas in her case it is, so to speak, ‘recessive’. While nominally he belongs to the same class as Dorothea, he possesses neither the social status nor the wealth that shield Dorothea from the awareness of economic reality; the only thing that stands between him and that awareness is ideology. He is thus subject to an ethico-political indictment at the level of consciousness in a way that Dorothea is not (or at least in response to which, in her case, one could plead extenuating circumstances); and the novel indicts him accordingly, in its depiction of the effects of class ideology on his values and choices. The novel’s treatment of Lydgate in this way raises its analysis of individual consciousness to the level of the ethico-political. The narrator’s explicit ethico-political analysis of Lydgate in turn alerts us to the novel’s critical awareness of the larger historical context that frames the stories of all its actors. The central figure of this encompassing politicoeconomic reflection is, oddly enough, the semi-comical Brooke. Brooke brings the political concretely into the novel through his reform candidacy for Parliament, which results in his enlisting Ladislaw in the cause of reform, thus giving him the vocation he has been looking for. And Brooke is also the catalyst of the crucial conversation with Sir James and

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the Cadwalladers in which the novel’s awareness of the material base of the country gentry’s existence is signalled, so that the place of a wide variety of other socio-political phenomena in the novel’s conceptual structure comes into focus. As I have already indicated, Ladislaw is the link between Dorothea and this elaborate structure. He has received little respect from critics over the decades, even though his activity comes closest to full outward manifestation of his quantum of energy of anyone in any of Eliot’s novels. One critic who thought well of him, however, was Raymond Williams. Williams described him as follows in The English Novel: Ladislaw is a free man in the way the others are not; a free mind with free emotions; a man who is wholly responsive. He isn’t tied by property, which he can reject in a principled way . . . Since unlike Lydgate he can accept poverty, he is not frustrated, is not corrupted, does not become resigned. Coming from ‘nowhere’, belonging ‘nowhere’, he is able to move, to relate and so to grow in ways that the others are not.   . . . This is George Eliot thinking beyond, feeling beyond, the restrictions and the limitations she has so finely recorded; thinking into mobility not as dislocating but as liberating; with some anxiety, certainly . . . but following a thread to the future . . .4

I think Williams’s assessment of him is fundamentally right, and I am pleased to be able to invoke him as an ally in what may seem an unlikely valuation of Ladislaw. Yet the same Williams who affirmed the existence of a ‘thread to the future’ in Middlemarch inspired the historicising critique of Middlemarch to which I referred earlier. In Culture and Society, writing not about Middlemarch but about Felix Holt, Williams wrote that Eliot’s work rejects history and the political in favour of a culturalist, universalist humanism that is deeply mistrustful of the working classes and hence conservative in its political bearings.5 The materialist critics of the 1980s then developed this accusation much further, unlike Williams making no exception for Middlemarch. The continuity between Felix Holt and Middlemarch adduced by most of these critics does indeed reveal the deep background of the later novel’s political thought, but it does so in a way quite different from what they see.

Felix Holt and the Signs of the Social The critics of the 1980s reiterated Williams’s claim in Culture and Society that in Felix Holt Eliot’s humanist moralism is put directly in the mouth of the protagonist, Felix Holt, and addressed to the workers

­116    Spirit Becomes Matter of England, who are enjoined to put their faith in the reform of their own moral character rather than in electoral reforms. For Eliot and Holt, according to Williams, ‘The people are . . . dangerous, in their constant tendency to blind disorder . . . George Eliot’s advice . . . is that the working men should first make themselves “sober and educated”, under the leadership of men like Felix Holt, and then reform will do some good’ (Culture and Society, 105–6). The ascription of these views to Eliot herself appears to be confirmed by the version of Holt’s speech that Eliot subsequently published as a free-standing piece, apparently expressing her own views in thinly fictionalised form, under the title ‘Address to Working-men, by Felix Holt’. Cottom (121–2), David (206–7) and Gallagher (265–6) all follow Williams in reading Felix Holt as a moralising, anti-political work, but then, going beyond Williams, they extrapolate a corresponding reading of Middlemarch. I will take as my opening into this debate Gallagher’s reading of another, informal speech by Felix. Gallagher argues that this speech illustrates how in Eliot’s fiction the social world increasingly becomes an arbitrary system of social representations detached from the ‘socio-­ economic’. In fact, however, the remarks Gallagher cites patently criticise the seduction of the individual by signs of class that are a direct index of socio-economic reality, a criticism that anticipates the materialist dimension of Middlemarch. Here are Holt’s words that Gallagher cites: ‘O yes, your ringed and scented men of the people! – I won’t be one of them. Let a man once throttle himself with a satin stock, and he’ll get new wants and new motives. Metamorphosis will have begun at his neck-joint, and it will go on till it has changed his likings first and then his reasonings, which will follow his likings as the feet of a hungry dog follow his nose.’6

Gallagher comments: Oddly, Felix, who professes not to be interested in outward appearances, actually believes some of those appearances to be absolutely related to inner states. He reverses the normal order of causality of realism: instead of believing that meanings find expression in signs, he believes that signs cause their meanings. In Felix’s image, the sign literally makes its own meaning. (239)

Gallagher finds Eliot, through Holt, rejecting ‘the signs of the social’ (the clothes one wears, or the luxury objects one has in one’s home) because they are ‘the representation of mere fact’, and therefore incapable of yielding the cultural or political ‘values’ which she had formerly sought there (237). Instead, Gallagher argues, Eliot now opts for an Arnoldian ‘culture’ that has neither a divine sanction nor a real worldly locus but which is idealised as the salvation of a social world the reality of which Eliot cannot stomach.7

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What Holt ‘devalues’ in these remarks is, however, quite explicitly signs that are integral to, and can therefore serve as a metonymy for, the ensemble of forces constituting individuals socially as members of the dominant classes. Gallagher misses the surprisingly witty irony of Holt’s moralising (‘metamorphosis will have begun at his neck-joint’), which concerns not the creative power of arbitrary signs, as Gallagher would have it, but the sociology of embourgeoisement. Holt does not say that external signs cause inner states through some mystical signative force; he uses the neckcloth as a metonymy for the social pressures that, when one is caught up in the dynamic of upward mobility, begin to reshape subjectivity (‘he’ll get new wants and new motives’) and thus to distort one’s original political intentions. The interpretation of this passage is of crucial importance for the understanding of what Eliot is up to in her political novels, because the same critique of embourgeoisement is at work in Middlemarch. Middlemarch represents Lydgate as a victim of the shaping power of the entirely motivated signs of the social, using Lydgate’s taste in boots as a metonymy of this power in precisely the way that she has Holt use his satin stock. Nothing was more carefully chronicled by the Victorian novel than the social power of the external signs of class, which not only indicate class standing but in part constitute it, and which for both of these reasons can attract considerable libidinal investment from the persons who acquire these signs. In the remarks cited, Holt is pithily noting that a satin neckcloth is not an isolated social fact or a meaningless appearance but part of the construction of a new class identification involving new needs, for the satisfaction of which money is necessary, with all the social entanglements that the getting of money implies – entanglements of which he means to keep clear. Clothes belong to the chain of ‘distinction’ that moves through china, china cabinets, a house to hold them, carriage and horses and so forth; and the entire ensemble of such ‘social signs’ constitutes the exoskeleton of the Victorian system of social relations, which holds in place the Victorian arrangement of economic power, and which catches Lydgate in its web. In the absence of suspicion like Holt’s, this matrix of ‘signs’ can lay a fatal trap for the individual’s shaping energy.

Felix Holt’s Ascetic Morality If we are to align the ethico-political categories of Felix Holt with those of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, as Gallagher does, there is no doubt

­118    Spirit Becomes Matter that Holt is quite thoroughly and pungently Hebraic – not, as Gallagher claims, Eliot’s representation of Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’. Hebraic in Arnold’s terminology is, of course, ascetic in mine; and Holt very clearly belongs to the ascetic type. Gallagher’s best evidence for the Hellenism of Holt is that the narrator attributes to him ‘the face of culture’; yet this momentary labelling will not stand up against the weight of Holt’s depiction throughout the novel as a whole, which treats him as a seething turmoil of Hebraic ascetic will to power. When, for example, Esther tells him that he seems to ‘care little’ about himself he responds like an earthly version of St John Rivers: ‘It is just because I am a very ambitious fellow, wanting a great deal to satisfy me, that I have chosen to give up what people call worldly good . . . If I once went into that sort of struggle for success, I should want to win – I should defend the wrong that I had once identified myself with . . . And what’s more, I should do this, as men are doing it every day, for a ridiculously small prize . . . for the sake of two parlours, . . . a discontented wife, and several unhopeful children.’ (27)

This is no mere discontent with the rewards of middle-class life; Holt is driven by a deep well of hatred and anger against everything that degrades the world from the vision that his desire presents to him. He is, he confesses to Mr Lyon, ‘perhaps too fond of banging and smashing’, because he cannot find ‘anything perfect enough to be venerated’ (5). Despite long years of self-discipline, ‘when once exasperated, the passionateness of his nature . . . concentrated itself in a rage as ungovernable as that of boyhood . . . Felix had a terrible arm: he knew that he was dangerous’ (30; emphasis added). If his face is the face of ‘culture’, it is clear that his arm is the arm of something else; and in the end his ‘fondness for banging and smashing’ proves his undoing, when he winds up killing a constable. Felix’s righteous rage enables him to tear himself away from the middle class and embrace a proletarian life for idealistic reasons, but it also renders him too isolated and unstable to be capable of genuine leadership. His notorious speech to the workers, far from being a straightforward representation of Eliot’s own views, is situated at the intersection of the contradictions that afflict both Holt himself and the political situation that the novel represents as too complex to be mastered by the mere raging force of his moral impulse or ascetic will to power. Holt gives his address as a rebuttal to a speech by a ‘tradesunion man’; and it is true that the narratorial voice underwrites Holt’s demurral, contrasting the ‘mere acuteness and hard-lipped antagonism’ of the union man with the noble look of ‘culture’ on Holt’s own face.

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But this narratorial evaluation must be weighed in the balance of the full novelistic context. Since Holt is an angry, dangerous man, his mode of being is harder to distinguish from the ‘hard-lipped antagonism’ the narrator sees in the union man than the narrator momentarily lets on. Moreover, when Holt in his speech declares that ‘if any working man expects a vote to do for him what it never can do, he’s foolish’, a group of passing Tories voices its agreement with shouts of ‘Hear, Hear’. Holt’s moralism, missing its addressee, is redefined by this response as supportive of the class that Holt opposes, and is thus shown to be as capable of being co-opted as are the opinions of the ignorant voters that Holt fears will be prey to political opportunists.8 But Holt himself had shortly before shouted ‘Hear, Hear’ to one part of the union man’s speech. The novel thus sets up an ironic echo-chamber of political speech, in which the addressee that a political message finds is shown to be random and variable. Finally, and most crucially for my argument in this chapter, the pragmatic argument of the union man, that the workers should support a ‘liberal aristocrat’ if he will serve their ends – the argument that Holt criticises – will be echoed persuasively by Ladislaw in Middlemarch. Yet Ladislaw shares Holt’s estrangement from bourgeois class affiliation, and is depicted as succeeding, to the degree that he does succeed, because of this estrangement. In the character of Holt, Eliot explores the possibility that an individual might, by a conscious effort, attain some freedom from the prescriptions of class ideology with its attendant material entanglements, and Ladislaw represents a continuation – emanating, surprisingly, from a physio-psychology the diametric opposite of Holt’s – of this exploration, an exploration that is given a new dimension by the binary opposition that Eliot now develops between Ladislaw and Lydgate.

Lydgate’s Class While Lydgate is integrally worked into the structure of political significance in Middlemarch, he stands largely outside the problematic of ascetic will that runs through most of Eliot’s novels, and in relation to which even Ladislaw’s hedonism can be understood. Perhaps this feature of Lydgate’s characterisation tells us something about the distinctive nature of the novel of which Eliot originally conceived him as the protagonist, and about why she was unable to finish it as such and in the end merged it with the story of Dorothea. In any case, he is neither strikingly self-repressed nor strikingly hedonistic; he enjoys the usual worldly satisfactions of the bourgeoisie, but has a well-organised

­120    Spirit Becomes Matter power-seeking economy in which the satisfaction of certain drives is sacrificed on behalf of the satisfaction of drives aimed at larger, more distant, but still worldly, goals that promise satisfaction of his desire for world-historical scientific achievement. He has, in fact, the most grandly conceived will to power of anyone in the novel – a will to power that is nevertheless, like Dorothea’s, and for similar reasons, destined to be sucked into the vortex of the social outside. From the ethico-political standpoint, what is most significant about Lydgate, and about Lydgate’s structural position with respect to Ladislaw, is his inability to even contemplate the idea of standing outside of class, the idea that Ladislaw relishes. Lydgate’s class location is the one that most interested the Victorian novel, as evidenced by the prevalence of baronets in nineteenth-century British novels from Persuasion to The Egoist: the interface between the upper bourgeoisie and the lower aristocracy. His own view of his class location is an unreflecting confidence that, despite his relative poverty, he is superior to the commercial, city bourgeois into whose company he has fallen, and sure that he has to maintain the ‘image’, as we would say, that manifests this superiority, however much money it might cost. The narrator’s critical judgement on this aspect of his character is rendered with an irony that is nowhere else in the novel more cutting: That distinction of mind which belonged to his intellectual ardour, did not penetrate his feeling and judgement about furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known (without his telling) that he was better born than other country surgeons. He did not mean to think of furniture at present; but whenever he did so, it was to be feared that neither biology nor schemes of reform would lift him above the vulgarity of feeling that there would be an incompatibility in his furniture not being of the best.9

Lydgate’s vulgarity is more damning than that exhibited by any other major character in Middlemarch because it causes the foundering of a genuinely powerful capacity for social action, and it is more enmeshed in self-deception because vulgarity is the taint of mind of which he believes himself least capable. The most salient aspect of Lydgate’s vulgarity is his attitude toward women, which expresses itself first in his choice of Rosamond for a wife and then in his incapacity to make her a partner in his life decisions (while attributing all the intransigence to her);10 but at the level of Eliot’s economic-materialist critique it is really his taste in furniture that is determinative. The dry irony of the order in which the narration lists the objects of Lydgate’s vulgarity in taste (‘His feeling and judgement about furniture, or women’) has more than one valence. Lumping furniture

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and women together, with furniture listed first, seems mainly to point to a vulgarity that sees women as chattel, one possession among others. But the remark then focuses without irony on Lydgate’s attitude toward furniture as what ‘was to be feared’. Eliot no doubt conceives of this as a moral flaw in Lydgate, but there is nothing merely moralistic about this judgement. She shows with great precision how this flaw is determined by the specific ethico-political constitution of Lydgate’s character. Furniture is a synecdoche for the panoply of material objects indicative of social distinction, and Lydgate’s taste in furniture is determined by the kind of distinction that he cannot help but feel appropriate to who he is. Here is where we see fully developed the political moral of Felix Holt’s refusal to wear a silk stock at his neck, a moral that the narrator does not neglect to make explicit: ‘We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own case, link us indissolubly with the established order.’ Lydgate, indeed, does not even care for extreme opinions; ‘he would have liked no barefooted doctrines, being particular about his boots’ (36). This passage points us toward the fact that the much-maligned Rosamond is only the accidental cause of the failure of Lydgate’s scientific ambitions and his schemes for the charity hospital. The essential cause is his lack of any critical consciousness with regard to his positioning within social and economic reality. The narration will go on scrupulously to detail Lydgate’s sumptuary outlays, including various reckless purchases that he makes, not at Rosamond’s prompting, but entirely off his own bat. Like Rosamond, or Dorothea, Lydgate is blinded to economic reality by class ideology, and Rosamond’s expensive tastes sink him only because they are the mirror of his own. That is why he is unable to recognise them until too late, and under compulsion, as anything that is not given in the nature of things.

The Aristocratic Bourgeois The account of Lydgate’s class identification and economic unconsciousness lies at the centre of the account in Middlemarch of the ‘complex web’ of social relations, and grounds the rest of the account in the central fact of economic reality: what things cost, and what one has to do in order to pay for them. The question of money is central to the realist novel in general, and it is not uncommon for its protagonists to live beyond their means; but Balzac’s Baron Hulot, for example, is driven to exceed his means by his ungovernable sexual appetite, and

­122    Spirit Becomes Matter Thackeray’s Becky Sharp is a rogue who consciously swindles her creditors. Lydgate is driven not by need, greed or appetite, the typical motives of over-expenditure in the realist novel, but purely by a class ideology that has come unglued from its material conditions of possibility. This ideology serves Brooke or Sir James well in the carrying on of their own economic activities, since aloofness from mere profit-for-its-own-sake through the sense that noblesse oblige goes well with their noble sources of revenue; but there is a radical disjunction between, on the one hand, Lydgate’s style of life and, on the other hand, his unwillingness to accept a salary from Bulstrode’s hospital or profits from dispensing drugs. The true aristocrat inhabits social dominance ‘naturally’, with a sort of socio-economic sprezzatura, neither knowing nor caring what things cost – as though for him or her wealth appeared magically, without effort, or at least without the ungenteel physical effort of the shopkeeper. Thus the Brooke family is said to be ‘good’ even though ‘not exactly aristocratic’ – which means also not exactly not aristocratic – because their recent lineage is not shadowed by any ‘yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers’ (5).11 The town gentry is still visibly involved in making money, but the country gentry’s aristocratic form of property, together with its associated status and style of life, gives the town gentry the social form of its desire. To own not a house in the city but an estate, and no longer to make money from shop or factory but to collect interest or the rents of tenants: that was the ideal goal in the ideological imaginary of the nineteenth-century English bourgeoisie.12 This pattern of ‘gentrification’ or ‘aristocratisation’ of the bourgeoisie, its ‘slavish imitation of the landed aristocracy and its mores’, led the bourgeoisie to link itself politically to the aristocracy and to distance itself from the working class.13 Lydgate inserts himself into this heavily charged social context as a representative from above. He has only a small patrimony, yet enough so that his ‘wants’ have always ‘been supplied without any trouble to himself’ (18), and up to the point of economic disaster he continues to display before the city gentry of Middlemarch the ‘careless refinement’ (68) of the aristocrat who is above all mean pecuniary considerations. He is the poor kin of aristocracy, who must earn his way in the world, but in his descent into the poorer strata of the medical profession Lydgate still bears the aura of one-who-does-not-work, an aura that wreaks havoc on his economic consciousness. The problem with Lydgate’s economic false consciousness is highlighted by the contrast between him and Ladislaw. The objective class situations of these two are quite similar: both are orphans, but of bourgeois origin; both have been raised and educated by upper-class

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relatives; both have studied in Europe; both now have to make their own way in the world of the professions. The crucial difference between them is not in their class location as such, but in the fact that the social form of Lydgate’s desire is determined, at the level of property, by his class of origin, while Ladislaw’s is not.

Good Gates, High Rents, Land Agents The deepest irony of Lydgate’s downfall is that in reality the aristocratic class to which he is related is, as Eliot shows, no more above pecuniary concerns than any other class. The aristocratic bias against the profit motive did not prevent the English aristocracy from being ‘actively supportive of commerce and in love with every form of economic modernisation that might enrich it’.14 This bias did, however, make the aristocracy prefer those pursuits of money that were commensurate with their noble image of themselves, and which enabled them to dissimulate their concern for profits.15 This brings me to the brunt of my demonstration of the political consciousness of Middlemarch, if not precisely of Eliot herself. The aristocracy’s concern with profit, and the way in which this concern clashes with the interests of the lower classes, forms the materialist substratum, beneath the more explicit focus on the question of reform, in this novel. The crucial chapter in this respect is thirty-eight, in which the Cadwalladers and Sir James try to persuade Brooke that he ought to make improvements on his tenant farms. This discussion thematises the question of estate modernisation that has been hinted at earlier in the book, in particular by means of Dorothea’s involvement with plans for workers’ cottages. Dorothea, and Sir James in this discussion, treat estate modernisation as an essentially humanitarian question: ‘I do think’, Sir James says to the Cadwalladers before Brooke’s arrival, ‘one is bound to do the best for one’s land and tenants, especially in these hard times.’ But in the end Eliot makes explicit the underlying concern with profit. At the beginning of the chapter Sir James and the Cadwalladers are discussing an article in the conservative Trumpet that has accused Brooke of being an irresponsible landlord, one who does not care ‘if every field on his farms has a rotten gate’ (281). Brooke then arrives and begins talking excitedly to the company about the new revolution that has broken out across the channel (on which more below); but Mr Cadwallader dampens Brooke’s revolutionary enthusiasm by informing him of the charges in the Trumpet, and Sir James adds that Brooke’s

­124    Spirit Becomes Matter tenant Dagley has complained to him ‘that he hadn’t got a decent gate on his farm’. Sir James then mentions that Garth has invented ‘a new pattern of gate’ that he thinks Brooke ought to try, but Brooke replies that he does not go in for ‘fancy farming’. What Brooke calls ‘fancy farming’ was in fact an urgent new phase of the rationalisation of the feudal estate system that was under way in the first part of the nineteenth century. The references to new designs for gates point to the fact that enclosure was once again an important issue; according to J. V. Beckett, investment in enclosure at this time yielded returns superior to those from paper securities, on average allowing owners to double the rent on their land.16 The fact that Brooke allows his farms to fall into decay thus means simultaneously that he is not a humane landlord and also that he does not understand how to maximise his own profit. Until Brooke leaves there is no direct reference to the fact that it is neither for the landowner’s amusement nor directly for humanitarian reasons that good, operating gates are necessary, but, as an essential feature of the efficient enclosure of livestock, in the first instance for profit. Upon Brooke’s departure, however, acerbic Mrs Cadwallader tells the men that they have used the wrong sorts of arguments with Brooke: ‘You should have proved to him that he loses money by bad management’ (283). And a remark by Sir James shows that, despite his humanitarian rhetoric, he is as aware as Mrs Cadwallader of the profit motive and Brooke’s confused relation to it. When the others urged him to lay out money for ‘gates and repairs’, Brooke had replied that at least he didn’t bother his tenants for unpaid rent; ‘I let the old tenants stay on,’ he had said. After Brooke leaves, however, Sir James observes that ‘in point of fact, no new tenant would take the farms on the present terms’ (283). Sir James’s business eye is sound, for, as Beckett notes, ‘an owner lacking investment capital, or unwilling to finance infrastructural improvements such as building, fencing, and draining, was unlikely to be able to . . . attract tenants capable and willing to adopt new techniques, and to pay high rents’ (157); this was particularly true in the difficult economic times after 1815 (179). Beckett’s book, which provides a comprehensive picture of the economic complex that is implied by the novel – and with which Eliot would have been intimately familiar, since her father had been a land agent – is an essential companion to the reading of Middlemarch. The discussion among Brooke, Sir James and the Cadwalladers points to the massive transformation that was taking place in the English estate system as the country aristocracy moved toward modernisation of agricultural techniques, and the actions and motives of such major characters as Dorothea and Garth come under a new light when we

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understand how accurately George Eliot has placed them in the context of this transformation. The main concomitants of enclosure were improvements in drainage (hence Brooke’s ‘draining tiles’), and in the rationalisation of farm buildings, including workers’ cottages (Beckett, 174–5).17 Dorothea’s perpetual poring over plans for new buildings is thus her own naïvely humanitarian participation in a fundamentally profit-driven process. The crucial point about the sentimentally depicted Garth for the materialist dimension of the novel is that he is, like Eliot’s father, a land agent – a new type of professional who was at this time replacing the traditional ‘steward’ as part of the modernising and rationalising movement (Beckett, 144), and the land agent was an economic instrument of the landowning class. Garth remarks that he would like to work ‘for nothing’ (295), and sometimes has done so, and the narrator comments that ‘By “business” Caleb never meant money transactions, but the skilful application of labour’ (402); yet he is represented as an astute businessman who performs all the varied economic functions of the land agent, the purpose of which is profit for his employer – of which his own salary constitutes a share. Garth handles accounts (413), assesses the value of real estate for Dorothea (intending to ‘dispose . . . ­advantageously’ of it to the railroad, exactly like the scheming Peter Solomon who has set the labourers against the surveyors (301)), and is capable of estimating off the cuff the likely income (between four and five hundred pounds per year) that he will receive from the stewardship of the two estates, Sir James’s and Brooke’s, that he is offered (294). ‘I’m going to be as rich as a Jew,’ he quips to Farebrother shortly after, in a rare display of humour. Like the aristocrats he serves, Garth, this remark notwithstanding, dislikes thinking crudely about profit; nevertheless, ‘business’ is the word with which, in a mystified but quite accurate fashion, he refers to the capital improvements on farmland that he, like Dorothea (whose ‘head for business’ Caleb praises (402)), is perpetually envisioning.18 The novel partially mystifies Garth’s true socio-economic role, yet it is depicted in detail, and its ethico-political valence is dramatised in the scene in which the angry country labourers assault the railroad surveyors, breaking the leg of one. Garth rescues the surveyors and then explains to their attackers that they must submit to the coming of the railroad in the name of progress. One of the labourers, however, named Timothy, makes a rustically eloquent speech in reply, listing the supposed improvements he has seen in his lifetime, none of which has improved the lot of the poor man; ‘An’ so it’ll be wi’ the railroads,’ he predicts. He then adds this barb: ‘But yo’re for the big folks, Muster

­126    Spirit Becomes Matter Garth, yo are.’ The narrator comments that Garth is stumped by Timothy’s response, having no counter to ‘rustics who are in possession of undeniable truth which they know through a hard process of feeling, and can let it fall like a giant’s club on your neatly-carved argument for a social benefit which they do not feel’ (56; Eliot’s italics). The scene thus lays bare Garth’s role as representative of the interests of the aristocracy, and like the scene between Dagley and Brooke instantiates the ‘massive sense of wrong in a class’ that Ladislaw takes as his political polestar.19

Ladislaw the Radical Ladislaw does not look very radical from our standpoint, but in the historical context he radiates a bit of both the allure and the threat of the revolutionary. The French tendency toward revolution, and the English hysteria about this tendency, frame the reform agitation that presents Ladislaw with the opportunity for effectual political action, and colour the reaction to Ladislaw by his political opponents.20 In the heated atmosphere of 1829 the expansion of the franchise was perceived by conservatives as threatening to ‘overturn the Constitution’ (8), and Ladislaw is seen in Middlemarch as a representative of this threat.21 The editor of the conservative journal, the Trumpet, sees him as agitating against ‘institutions which had existed when he was in his cradle’, and calls him an ‘energumen’, a term that he links to the French Revolution (339). The Pioneer, Brooke’s reformist newspaper that Ladislaw edits, carries a motto from Charles James Fox, the Whig leader who notoriously never recanted his support for the first French revolution.22 These references to 1789 are then given increased urgency by the mention to which I referred earlier of the July Revolution of 1830 that threw out the Bourbons. This mention, which occurs at the meeting between Sir James, the Cadwalladers and Brooke, points to a substantial political resonance in the Brooke-Dagley affair, one that impacts directly on Ladislaw. When Brooke walks in on his neighbours, he says: ‘Well, what do you think of things? – going on a little fast! It was true enough what Lafitte said – “Since yesterday, a century has passed away”: – they’re in the next century, you know, on the other side of the water. Going on faster than we are.’23 Brooke’s remark implies that he thinks the British are lagging behind on the question of reform; yet only a few pages later he gets a taste of revolution on his own property from the drunk, menacing tenant Dagley, who brings the accusations against Brooke in the Trumpet to vivid life, humiliating Brooke in front of an audience of labourers.

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This scene directly influences Brooke’s attitude toward reform on the key issue, the one that seemed to conservatives most threatening to the constitution, and on which even a liberal like Brooke could be shaky: the extension of suffrage. Brooke’s dithering over reform accurately represents the ambivalence of the reformers of the period, who were both attracted to and fearful of the expansion of democracy, and whose social privileges and economic interests were deeply embedded in the established order; and his encounter with Dagley manifests the class conflict that Brooke uncomprehendingly inhabits. Where was the line to be drawn once the franchise began to be extended? As an apparent consequence of the direct challenge to his authority from Dagley, a representative of the classes he is about to empower, Brooke subsequently backslides on the expansion of the franchise, arguing against Ladislaw that there is no reason why the threshold for enfranchisement should be set at the ten-pound householder – a threshold that would, and did, enfranchise most tenant farmers like Dagley (366).24 When shortly thereafter he gives the ill-fated speech at which a heckler brings down the ridicule of the crowd on him, he seems to have entirely lost his grip on reform, making his hecklers’ job easy (370–1). He then gives up the Pioneer, the reformist publication at which he had employed Ladislaw, leaving the latter at a loose end (373). Bernard Semmel calls Ladislaw ‘a bourgeois Felix Holt’, but this is quite misleading because the anti-political view pressed by Holt is picked up in Middlemarch not by Ladislaw but by Lydgate, who sneers – at Ladislaw – that society can’t ‘be cured by a political hocus-pocus’ and deplores the ‘superstitious exaggeration of hopes’ about the reform bill.25 Ladislaw, in contrast, defends the reform movement against Lydgate, thus taking up the position of the union man against whom Holt argues that such imperfect instruments as are available (Transome in Felix Holt, Brooke in Middlemarch) must be seized if they will agree to serve the cause of reform. ‘Wait for wisdom and conscience in public agents – fiddlestick! The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims. That’s my text – which side is injured? I support the man who supports their claims; not the virtuous upholder of the wrong.’ (46)

‘The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class’: these words ring out in the context of the debate over the moralism of Eliot’s novels. They have been variously interpreted by critics of Eliot’s politics, yet in the full scope of the novel’s political-economic bearings there is no reason not to take them straight. Ladislaw throws

­128    Spirit Becomes Matter himself into the cause of reform, at first as a journalist, eventually, according to the Finale, as ‘an ardent public man’ who remains ‘in the thick of a struggle’ against wrongs (610–11). In this and related ways material interests and class conflict are depicted in Middlemarch as the background against which Lydgate and Ladislaw are to be understood, and the personal relations between the characters play out against the exigencies generated by political events and economic necessity. Dorothea’s choice to marry Ladislaw has nothing directly to do with any of this; she has humanitarian concerns, but no awareness of, or connection with, politics or economics. But Ladislaw does; and there is a subtle, but precise, reference to this, and to the socio-economic context that is depicted in the novel, in the kind of knowledge she expects to gain from her marriage to him – the knowledge of ‘what everything costs’.

Notes  1. John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Daniel Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832–67 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985). Kucich’s highly original reading stands somewhat apart from the others, but has a similar ethico-political valence.   2. See, for example, George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); J. Hillis Miller, Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Suzy Anger, Victorian Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). ‘Wanting to know what it is like not to be me is the corollary of wanting full sympathetic understanding of something that is not-me,’ writes Levine. ‘There’s an epistemological question here, a question that haunts Victorian realist fiction, and it’s an ethical one as well. It’s the “Why Always Dorothea” question, compounded by the problem of whether it’s at all possible to know anything else’ (252). Miller’s thesis that ‘all interpretation is misinterpretation’ is based in Nietzsche, but his tour de force reading of interpretation in Middlemarch serves a purely ethical vision of humanity, as Levine’s and Anger’s do. Thus Miller’s conclusion is that ‘Life is seen positively [in Middlemarch] as the free and contradictory struggle of individual human energies, each a centre interpreting the whole’ (138). Miller’s Nietzsche is not the materialist and physio-psychologist but the perspectivist and enunciator of ‘the great unbounded Yes’.  3. Levine discusses the significance of money in Middlemarch, and in the

What Things Cost in Middlemarch    129 Victorian novel generally, from a strictly moral standpoint, in How to Read the Victorian Novel (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), pp. 147–54.   4. Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 93.   5. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 102–9. This book was originally published in 1958; hence Williams’s reading of Holt preceded his reading of Ladislaw by twelve years.   6. George Eliot, Felix Holt the Radical (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1970), p. 59. This edition cited throughout.   7. In her critique of Eliot, Gallagher echoes Williams’s critique in Culture and Society of the Arnoldian concept of culture. Williams argued that Arnold contradictorily defined culture as both immanent in human institutions and as the transcendent norm of these same institutions. In its role as transcendent norm, however, culture would have had to have a nonworldly origin such as that assigned it by Newman, a recourse denied Arnold by his insistence on the socially immanent nature of culture. Culture thus remains a pure abstraction. In Gallagher’s reprise of this argument (which, however, she does not cite), Eliot occupies Arnold’s place and Coleridge takes the place of Newman. See Williams, Culture and Society, pp. 127–8, and Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, pp. 236–7.   8. Williams comments that William Cobbett, who believed in the people in a way that Eliot did not, would have seen in Holt ‘a very convenient ally of the opponents of reform’ (Culture and Society, p. 105); but this perception is in fact built into the novel.  9. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Riverside, 1956), p. 15. 10. The conflict between what the novel depicts and the summary judgements made by the narrator is nowhere else as strongly marked as in the narrator’s complacent judgement that ‘Rosamond’s discontent in her marriage was due to the conditions of marriage itself . . . and not to the nature of her husband’ (75). Lydgate’s vulgarity as regards women and furniture, so abundantly documented by this same narrator, as well as his autocratic attitude toward Rosamond, which comes out on every occasion of conflict between them (‘he wanted . . . to tell her brutally that he was master and she must obey’ (64)), are at this moment utterly forgotten by the narrator. 11. It makes sense to think of the notion of aristocracy as encompassing ‘high gentry’ like the Brookes as well as the peerage and titled commonalty. Not only did the high gentry share the style of life of the aristocracy (though on a smaller scale), but as a class they were descended historically from the ‘lesser nobility’ of the Middle Ages, and across the centuries the daughters and younger sons of the peerage often moved down into the gentry (as in the case of Mrs Cadwallader, ‘a lady of immeasurably high birth, descended . . . from unknown earls’ (38)) while the gentry intermarried with the peerage and provided the constituency for new creations. See M. L. Bush, The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), and J. V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, 1660–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 16–131.

­130    Spirit Becomes Matter 12. W. D. Rubinstein suggests that, despite the apparently ample documentation provided by historians such as Martin J. Weiner (in English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1980 (London: Penguin Books, 1981)), there was in fact much less movement toward the land among the new rich in England than was formerly thought. For a sample of the debate on this question, see F. M. L. Thompson, ‘Life after death: how successful nineteenth-century businessmen disposed of their fortunes’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 43.1 (1990): 40–61, and Rubinstein’s riposte in the same journal (45.2 (1992): 350–61), ‘Cutting up rich: a reply to F. M. L. Thompson’. However statistically frequent, or infrequent, estate-purchase among the bourgeoisie might have been, however, it is clear that the landed aristocracy represented a social ideal at the pinnacle of the English status ladder, and that other forms of status were derivative from this ideal (on the aristocracy as the model class, see J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 101–6). Even Rubinstein describes ownership in the London West End as an urban ‘substitute’ for landed gentry status, and admits that ‘other milestones of social acceptability, like education at a public school or university’ belonged to a status complex that, while not ‘traditionally gentry’, was also not ‘wholly removed from the old facets of the status system’. W. D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture and Decline 1750–1990 (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 160. 13. Quotation from W. D. Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1981), p. 248. On the link between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, see Perry Anderson, ‘The Figures of Descent’, New Left Review 161 (January– February 1987): 20–77. 14. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 163. The English aristocracy were ‘capitalists although rentiers’; ‘Until the late nineteenth century they managed to have the best of both worlds: the profits of the entrepreneur and the prestige of the aristocrat.’ L. and J. F. Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 286. 15. The landed aristocracy of England not only continued throughout the nineteenth century to dominate the government but also, in alliance with London-centred finance and real estate, maintained its economic hegemony over the industrial bourgeoisie, which never came close to matching the wealth of the land-and-finance axis. See Rubinstein, Men of Property and Capitalism, Culture and Decline. Perry Anderson remarks that the ‘association of the landed aristocracy with the financial aristocracy’ was already noted by Marx, who gradually revised his original, widely repeated notion that mid-century England was ruled by the industrial bourgeoisie. Anderson, ‘The Figures of Descent’, p. 24. 16. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, p. 174. 17. ‘With tile drainage from the later eighteenth century on, the convention developed whereby the owner supplied the tiles and tenants laid them’ (Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, p. 175). Hence Brooke could do this much without any involvement or expertise on his own part. Unlike

What Things Cost in Middlemarch    131 enclosure, drainage seems to have yielded little profit in most cases; but around this time ‘owners anticipated high returns’ from investing in it (177). 18. As applied to Garth, and even more as applied to Dorothea, the signifier ‘business’ appears to manifest a dimension of the novel’s economic substratum that is not just subliminal in terms of the scriptorial intention, but part of its ‘political unconscious’. In terms of my analysis, however, this unconscious is immediately adjacent to, and easily accessible from the ground of, the subliminal material. 19. Not only did railroads increase the value of their land, but aristocrats and gentry were, as well, substantial investors in the railroad companies themselves (Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, p. 254). The assault by the labourers provides the occasion for Fred Vincy to become Garth’s assistant; but this sentimental coincidence is inscribed in a thoroughly historical conjuncture. 20. Eliot was intensely conscious of the French example; she was an interested observer of the revolutions of 1848 and 1871, and had radical friends like Frederic Harrison who indulged in the rhetoric of class warfare, at times intemperately. 21. The Reform Act did not hand over power to the middle classes, much less the working class. But it was perceived at the time as revolutionary, especially by conservatives, and if it did not reshape Parliament, it marked a radical shift in English society’s conceptualisation of itself. See Dror Warhman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 331–2. 22. A veritable cult developed around Fox after his death in 1806, and the contradictory meanings around which this cult congealed reflect the doubleness of Brooke’s political views: on the one hand, the Whigs were the ‘natural custodians’ of the constitution; on the other, they were the party that feared royal despotism more than it did the French Revolution. ‘The libertarian Fox of 1794–97 was thus superimposed upon the Rockingham Whigs of the 1770s.’ Frank O’Gorman, The Emergence of the British Two-Party System, 1760–1832 (London: Edward Arnold Ltd, 1982), pp. 68–9. 23. According to Jerome Beaty, Lafitte’s remark was made on 29 July. Beaty’s essential article shows how precise Eliot made her political chronology in Middlemarch. Beaty, ‘History by Indirection: The Era of Reform in Middlemarch’, in Gordon S. Haight (ed.), A Century of George Eliot Criticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), pp. 306–12. 24. On the range of expansion of the franchise by the final bill, see W. D. Rubinstein, Britain’s Century: A Political and Social History 1815–1905 (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 38–9. 25. Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 95.

Chapter 4

The Return to the Heath (Wuthering Heights)

To turn to Wuthering Heights is to enter a world radically different from the one inhabited by the characters of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. Emily Brontë is in this novel minimally interested in the dialectic of moral ideology and physio-psychological energy; her focus is, rather, on the direct expression of this energy in the struggle for domination among her various actors. Her gaze, like that of Baudelaire, is relentlessly eschatological, set always on the ultimate fate of mortal, sexed being; yet, strikingly, given its continual evocations of heaven and hell, the protagonist of Wuthering Heights evinces none of the characteristic nineteenth-century struggle with the remnants of belief. There is in Heathcliff no despair at the finality of the death of the body; no nostalgia for the heaven that once was; no turn to Christian morality as a replacement for Christian belief; no stance of bitter, or resigned, or heroic defiance of religious metaphysics. Baudelaire was still tormented by a latently Christian dualism, and even Nietzsche had to labour to get beyond Christian-Platonic metaphysics so that he could see the world and human life in an entirely worldly perspective; it is a breathtaking achievement on the part of Emily Brontë to have conceived, in 1847, a protagonist who is as simply apart from Christian belief and Christian morality as a character from Greek antiquity.1 Like an authentic pagan, Heathcliff merely despairs in the wake of Catherine’s death, with no thought of any kind regarding transcendence. Wuthering Heights is, in consequence, the great poem of mourning of modernity, as the Iliad was of antiquity. The two works, in fact, have much in common. They both tell the working out by means of vengeance of the unassuageable, grief-driven anger of their protagonists. The supposed dramatic apex of Wuthering Heights, the agony of Catherine and her final parting from Heathcliff, is really just the climax of the ‘rising action’; the working out of Heathcliff’s mourning, all the way to his ecstatic death, is its untying. The classical clarity of outline of this

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central plot is obscured for the reader by the narration, which shifts its focus along with the changes of place of the narrator, Nelly Dean, and brings the second Catherine to centre stage through much of the novel’s second half; but the novel’s designer was never distracted from this outline. Emily Brontë keeps the unabated force of Heathcliff’s mourning always at work, sometimes offstage, for a long time expressed as vengeful sadism, but always determining the architecture of the novel within which Nelly’s narration takes a subordinate place. Contrary to what is often said, the story of Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Linton resolves nothing, either satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily; it plays itself out on a parallel, but secondary, plane with that of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, never touching it, incapable of palliating its tragedy. The only resolution of the plot is the death and apotheosis, of sorts, of the central character, as this death is taken up into the complex double frame narration. Before we get to Heathcliff’s despair, however, I will have to show, in meticulous detail, how little basis there is in the text for much of the critical doxa about him.2 Everyone knows that Nelly’s narration is not entirely reliable, yet no one has attempted systematically to sift her words, and those of all the other characters as well, from beginning to end, to separate what belongs to her, and their, fabulation and what to the ‘reality’ that EB has with enormous subtlety implanted within this fabulation.3 Nelly’s censorious moral judgements are easy to distinguish from the narrated reality; but there are other, more important, ways in which she shapes the narrative. As I have already suggested, the illusion of the importance of the second (actually third) love story derives not from the architecture of the central plot, but from the fact that the centre of the narrated reality necessarily becomes whatever can be seen from wherever Nelly is. Then, there is the colouring that her rhetoric continually gives to the narrative. Nelly, who claims to be the only ‘sensible body’ in a world of people gone mad, is in fact a skilful storyteller, so spellbinding in her way of imagining the world of erotic love that she herself can never enter that for a century and a half her way of imagining it, rather than that world itself, as EB makes it evident beneath Nelly’s imaginative overlays, has compelled the imaginations of readers, as a consequence of which these readers have relegated her to a marginal role. Only at one point does she blatantly overleap the bounds of credibility, but it is enough to put us on the alert: when she claims that, from where she stood in the room, she could both see and hear Catherine’s heart beating during Catherine’s final meeting with Heathcliff. The overall design of the novel shows that EB means to bracket the Gothicism of Nelly’s narration, to distance it and subject it to her own

­134    Spirit Becomes Matter larger aesthetic discipline. That is the function of Lockwood’s narration, which contains Nelly’s narration, which contains the story of Heathcliff and Catherine. The narrative framework has received considerable critical attention, but its strictly formal role has never been adequately addressed.4 Two other problems that have never been seriously discussed will be central to the present discussion: first, the question of the architectonic function of the figure of Linton Heathcliff, which belongs to the part of the novel that has been judged least satisfactorily achieved; second, that of the novel’s closing, precisely in its formal function of providing closure to the novel. To take the question of closure seriously is to evaluate the design of the entire novel in terms of the way it is oriented toward its ending, which is what I attempt in this essay. Because Wuthering Heights has been so persistently bent to the needs of the critical imaginary, however, this evaluation will have to proceed by way of a preliminary, revisionary account of practically every major facet of the novel.

Heathcliff the Gentleman Wuthering Heights is no more about the authentic passions of beings who are close to nature in a Romantic or mythic sense, as an older criticism had it, than it is about the struggle of the working class, or the mythic-Romantic imagination of the struggle of the working class, as an expression of authentic natural passions in conflict with bourgeois society, as which more recent criticism has read it. Class subordination and class movement are indeed central to this novel, but as something so fluid that it loses contact with the friction of history. Heathcliff begins at the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy: a non-white, parentless, nameless, vagrant child. Then at a stroke he is grafted onto a genteel family, given his own horse, dressed and educated as gentry. Then, just as suddenly, he is thrown out of his new class position, back into the servant class, losing all visible marks of his previous class standing. Then, out of a blank space in the text, he emerges once more as a gentleman. Heathcliff himself is then the cause of similar abrupt class changes in others. First he reduces the patrician Isabella to a ‘thorough little slattern’, a condition from which she abruptly escapes to reclaim her gentility; then he throws Hareton down into the servant class, as Hindley had thrown him down, only to have Hareton re-emerge as a gentleman by the end of the novel. In representing class movement in this highly personalised and fluid way, Wuthering Heights highlights its conflictual nature; yet it digs no deeper than do Jane Austen’s novels

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beneath the visible effectivity of class status and class relations to the forces that determine this status and these relations. Everything that is depicted in this novel is calculated to evoke, as economically as possible, the localised, present effectuality, as social reality, of the larger social context, but, in contrast to Middlemarch, this is done only for the immediate purposes of the story that is being told, not to remind us of the dynamics of the larger social world beyond Heights and Grange. This larger social context, in fact, is effaced to the maximum degree possible in anything that can still be called a ‘realist’ novel. Whereas Middlemarch treats estate economics, for example, in detail, representing the plight of individual tenants, the viewpoints of estate owners, and the political background of the conflict of interests between them, and evokes, in passing, the realities of gates, drainage pipes and adequate housing for labourers, as well as the coming of the railways (see Chapter 3), Wuthering Heights twice mentions the tenants of the Earnshaw estate, and so fleetingly that the implications of their existence have gone practically unnoticed by critics. Yet the fact that the Earnshaws have tenants, in concert with everything else we learn about the Heights, implies that it is an estate of the classic country gentry variety, encompassing rental farms that would provide a steady source of income. Failure to recognise this fact led Terry Eagleton’s influential class-conflict reading of Wuthering Heights badly astray. It would make no sense, given their status as it is amply described in the novel, for the Earnshaws to ‘work the land’ like yeomen alongside their labourers, as Eagleton asserts that they do, nor does the novel mention them doing any such thing.5 The fact that Heathcliff is sentenced by Hindley to ‘labour out of doors’ like ‘any other lad on the farm’ shows that this kind of labour for an Earnshaw involves loss of class; Nelly calls it a ‘degradation’ (87). Nelly’s remark also indicates the presence at Wuthering Heights, at the time of Heathcliff’s banishment from the household, of other ‘lads’ to do this kind of work. We never actually see any household servants or farm labourers but Joseph and Nelly, but both classes of workers are explicitly named by Nelly, in the same remark that alerts us to the existence of tenants, when she notes that after Hindley’s bad behaviour drove ‘the servants’ away there remained ‘tenants and labourers’ for Joseph to ‘hector over’ (106). Joseph thus seems originally to have been some sort of foreman or overseer; the tenants would be the same ones whose rents Heathcliff will later collect as a ‘hard, cruel landlord’ (232). The Earnshaws are gentry of a rather rough variety, it is true, but gentry nonetheless. They have tenants, an ancient lineage – most desirable and unbuyable of marks of gentility – and a house that is the ‘next

­136    Spirit Becomes Matter best in the neighbourhood’ after the Grange (100; 240). They also keep horses: Nelly’s early remark that by age six Catherine ‘could ride any horse in the stable’ implies a stable supplied with multiple horses, and Earnshaw’s purchase of a colt each for Hindley and Heathcliff, apparently on impulse (‘at the parish fair’), is, in view of the horses already in the stable, a purely sumptuary expenditure, indicative of surplus wealth. The dilapidation of the premises that Lockwood notes in the novel’s opening pages belongs to the period of decay after the death of old Earnshaw, and there is no reason to doubt that Earnshaw, who has his children tutored by the same curate who tutors the young Lintons, and will subsequently send his son to ‘college’, is, like his successor Heathcliff in Lockwood’s assessment, ‘as much a gentleman as many a country squire’ (47). The conclusive evidence of the Earnshaws’ genteel status – as any reader of Victorian novels should recognise – is that the Lintons, the first family of the area, consent, entirely without reservations, to the match between Edgar and Catherine.6 Specifying the precise nature of the Earnshaws’ class belonging is crucial to dispelling the established picture of Heathcliff as class warrior and/or Radical Other, as also the earlier notions of him as force of nature, Wordsworthian child or Blakeian energy, because it begins to specify the precise kind of socialisation Heathcliff receives, as it is consistently represented in the novel. Left critics at least since Kettle have assumed that he has a class essence pinned on him at birth, or at least in his earliest years, so that, regardless of his subsequent socialisation, he remains in some ineliminable sense an ‘outcast slummy’ who represents the aspirations of his oppressed class.7 But Heathcliff is a very young child when Earnshaw adopts him, ambiguously around either two or six, depending on which face of EB’s account of him we consider, and – whatever we today might think about the degree of ‘interpellation’ that a child at either of those ages might receive – the novel itself treats him as an almost blank slate with respect to his early life. Neither his core identity nor the social form of his desire as an adult is ever represented as other than genteel.8 Nelly believes his affective economy has been ‘intoned’, as Volosinov would say, by his early experience of hardship, and I will argue that this is very important to the novel; but everything else about his interpellation as class subject is determined by his experience as Mr Earnshaw’s favourite, and he never shows even a latent identification with the lower classes.9 By the time he is thirteen or so, when his adoptive father dies, he has been thoroughly formed as a member of a privileged class, with no apparent awareness of ever having been anything else; he has had a ‘sense of superiority, instilled in him by the favours of old Mr Earnshaw’ (108) in six years of pampering,

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including three years as the only male (Hindley having been packed off to college). Neither does his race determine his social essence. Race too is capable of being socially constructed in different ways depending on social circumstances, and is so represented in this novel. When he is an orphan on the streets of Liverpool, or again, when he is reduced to being a dirty ‘plough boy’ by Hindley, his dark skin marks him as racially alien outsider; but as every critic today knows, and should remember when reading Wuthering Heights, race is not a natural fact and, as they say in Brazil, ‘money whitens’. Even more than money, clothes and bearing and, in England especially, accent whiten, and, except for the less than three years of his abjection by Hindley, Heathcliff has the advantage of all of these.10 His skin colour looms into prominence when he is thrown out of the circle of gentility; but it is otherwise indifferent. This is made clear in the opening pages of the novel, when Lockwood, who has as sharp a sense of class distinctions as anyone in the novel, analyses Heathcliff’s appearance and notes in passing his aspect of ‘dark-skinned gypsy’ but then describes at length the picture of ‘country squire’ that he otherwise presents. The only real anomaly Lockwood sees in this picture is the somewhat dilapidated state of Heathcliff’s dwelling, which Lockwood contrasts with his distinguished personal appearance.11 The novel itself gives us no reason to posit any kind of desire in Heathcliff other than that which accords with his social identity as I have described it, and what is true of Heathcliff’s constitution as class subject is, obviously, true also of the imperious ruling-class minx Catherine. The very brief period of excursions to the heath (about seven weeks, according to Knoepflmacher’s chronology) is central to many interpretations that see Heathcliff and Catherine’s love as in its very essence transcendent and thus incompatible with the symbolic order, but such readings give this period a great deal more significance than the novel itself gives it, and the wrong kind.12 The novel specifies that during this time not only does Catherine continue to be educated by the curate, but she passes on to Heathcliff what she learns (87). This continuing education, Nelly informs us, kept up Heathcliff’s morale under the ‘degradation’ of being driven from his status as gentleman-tobe. The remarkable fact that these two spontaneously set up as teacher and student to stave off the effects on Heathcliff of his banishment from the house indicates unmistakably the social form that their desire has already acquired by this time. The temporary decay of their manners, and their absence from church on Sundays, are the only indices Nelly can muster for her hyperbolic comment that they threatened to become ‘savages’ at this time. As much as they love the heath, it is clear that

­138    Spirit Becomes Matter they make it their exclusive scene of enjoyment only by default – as is conclusively shown by their enchantment with the Grange when they first look through its windows. Heathcliff asks Nelly whether Edgar and Isabella shouldn’t ‘have been happy’ in such a scene of genteel luxury, adding that he and Cathy would have thought themselves in ‘heaven’ if they had lived there (89). Only some time after Cathy’s transformation as a consequence of her five weeks’ stay at the Grange does Heathcliff show signs that he is beginning to lose his acculturation into the gentry, but even then ‘he struggled long to keep up an equality with Catherine in her studies, and yielded with poignant though silent regret’; and the look of the country clown that he eventually adopts is more an aggressive protest against the denial of access to gentility than it is any real loss of the manners, and manner, that he has already learned (‘his naturally reserved disposition was exaggerated into an almost idiotic excess of unsociable moroseness; and he took a grim pleasure, apparently, in exciting . . . aversion . . .’ (108)).13 Unsurprisingly, then, the ‘right’ that near the end of the book Heathcliff poignantly says he has struggled for has nothing in common with the right of a worker to be respected and given a decent wage; it is, rather, the right to ruling-class status of someone who once had it, and of which he feels he has been unjustly deprived. Despite his origins, he identifies completely with Hareton, who belongs to the ruling class by right of inheritance: ‘Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed a personification of my own youth . . . of my wild endeavours to hold my right, my degradation, my pride, my happiness, and my anguish’ (353–4). The fact that he is a ‘hard, cruel landlord’ to his tenants, his identification with Hareton, and his intention of arranging everything for his own son ‘to preserve the superior and the gentleman in him, above his associates’ (243) indicate that he neither identifies nor sympathises with the lower class. The right that he holds to be his is the right to be a ruler, an aristocrat, and EB takes no ironic distance from his attitude with regard to this. Since Heathcliff is a young gentleman whose education is interrupted for considerably less than three years (given the continuation of his studies ‘for a long time’ after his expulsion), there is nothing ‘miraculous’, as Nancy Armstrong claims, about his reappearance as a gentleman after another three years of exile; he has merely resumed an interrupted process of social formation.14 Nelly appears satisfied with her guess that he has been in the army during these years, and this is a well-founded, if not certain, surmise. The notions that he might have gone off to America to fight against Britain in the American Revolution, or made a ‘fortune more promptly, on the English highways’ (130–1),

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often repeated by critics, are not to be taken seriously. They are made whimsically by Lockwood before he even hears the story of Heathcliff’s return, and are preceded by other, equally jocular, speculations: ‘Did he finish his education on the Continent, and come back a gentleman? Or did he get a sizar’s place at college?’ Nelly’s reply that ‘he may have done a little in all these vocations’ (Continental scholar and highwayman, university student and American revolutionary, all in three years) makes it clear that she has caught the humour and is replying in kind; and it is subsequently, apparently in delayed response to Lockwood’s questions, that she twice declares her own notion that he has been a soldier, the second time adding that she deduces it from ‘his upright carriage’ (135). A nineteenth-century reader would have recognised a soldier’s carriage as strong evidence for her guess; and the notion that he has been a soldier accords well with the only thing Heathcliff himself ever says about his life in exile: ‘I’ve fought through a bitter life since I last heard your voice,’ he says to Catherine when they sit down to tea, ‘and you might forgive me, for I struggled only for you’ (136). Common soldiers in the British army of this period were paid a bare subsistence wage, but there were various legal and illegal ways in which soldiers augmented their official pay, including ‘prize’ money from military victories and, of particular interest in the present case, gambling.15 He would not have become rich this way, but the widely accepted notion that he comes home a wealthy man has at best dubious foundation in the text, and none in Nelly’s imagination. Nelly says to Lockwood that one of the few things she doesn’t know about Heathcliff is ‘how he got his money, at first’ (76), but there is no reason to assume that by ‘money’ she here means a fortune. She does not report any signs of wealth in his appearance when he first turns up at the Grange; and he is not riding a horse, even though it is night and, as Edgar says, he ‘will have a long walk, wherever he may lodge to-night’ (136).16 Nelly does mention wealth months later; when Isabella has fallen in love with Heathcliff, and Nelly and Catherine are trying to talk her out of it, Nelly asks Isabella, ‘How has he been living? How has he got rich?’ (142). But, since Nelly goes on to remind Isabella that Heathcliff has by now won so much money from Hindley that Hindley is mortgaging his land to keep up, the present perfect tense of ‘How has he been living? How has he got rich?’ is quite naturally interpreted as referring to recent months, not to the exile from which he returned some time before. Nelly utters these questions as a prelude to what she is about to reveal to Isabella, that Heathcliff has become rich by exploiting Hindley’s weakness.17

­140    Spirit Becomes Matter

The Earnshaw Culture of Violence Very early in her narrative Nelly says that ‘from the very beginning’ Heathcliff ‘bred bad feeling in the house’, but the only persistent bad feelings come from Hindley, and it is doubtful whether Heathcliff can be accused of ‘breeding’ these, at least at first. Heathcliff after the first few days develops even more marked concord with his adoptive sister than discord with his adoptive brother, and gets along well with Nelly; and even if he does not return his father’s love, and does not always obey him, there is no visible negativity between them. Heathcliff does aggravate the bad feeling between Hindley and old Earnshaw, but this bad feeling clearly pre-exists his arrival, as does Hindley’s bad nature, to which Heathcliff immediately falls victim. The promptness with which old Earnshaw strikes the six-year-old Catherine a ‘sound blow’ only for ‘grinning and spitting’ at the new arrival is the first indication of a violence that is pervasive in the household; in the weeks that follow, Hindley, who is fourteen years old at the time, beats, and Nelly pinches, the tiny orphan whenever they can get away with it. Nelly is, evidently, comfortable abusing a child that at that point she sees as lower than she on the pecking order (later I will have more to say about Nelly’s aggressivity); but she soon stops resenting Heathcliff. Hindley, however, continues his pattern of physical abuse against the boy, who is at least seven years younger and, it appears, small for his age. When years later Heathcliff demands Hindley’s new colt as a replacement for his own lamed one, he refers to ‘three thrashings’ Hindley has given him that week alone, which have left his arm ‘black to the shoulder’ – in response to which Hindley bashes him on the chest with an iron weight, and throws him under the feet of a horse. This appalling brutality against a much smaller child evinces more than the ordinary resentment of a natural son against an intruder who usurps his father’s regard – even supposing that Hindley ever possessed such regard from old Earnshaw. There is, clearly, something wrong with Hindley’s character that has nothing to do with Heathcliff’s intrusion. Mr Earnshaw sends him off to college three years after Heathcliff’s arrival with the judgement that he ‘was naught, and would never thrive as where he wandered’ (82) – a prediction that is proved true by the subsequent course of his life. And Nelly retrospectively classifies Hindley’s physio-psychological nature as intrinsically inferior, rating the traits promised by the adolescent Hareton’s physiognomy as ‘better than any his father ever possessed’ (231). The fact that the violent Hindley at age fourteen ‘blubbers aloud’ for a broken violin reveals a likely reason for Earnshaw’s disaffection with his son, and gives a hint of the way Hindley will fall apart after the

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death of his wife. Heathcliff is, evidently, the son for whom Earnshaw yearns, the strong, enduring one who could make up for his apparent disappointment in Hindley. Hindley, not Heathcliff, originates the dialectic of vengeful sadism in Wuthering Heights. After his wife’s death he becomes the original model of Gothic brutality in the novel, after which, clearly, the adolescent Heathcliff – who as a child has no visible inclination to violence – shapes himself. It is a remarkable fact – though one which I have never seen remarked – that as a child Heathcliff is the only one of the Earnshaw children (including Nelly) we never see commit a violent act. He never tries to retaliate physically against Hindley, and even after his expulsion from the household, when Nelly paints him as a little savage, he responds to Edgar’s contempt not by striking him, as Catherine will do a few pages later, but by throwing a tureen of hot apple sauce at him (99). To judge from the ease of Edgar’s recovery, the apple sauce does him no actual harm. When we consider Heathcliff’s act in the context of the culture of violence at the Heights, Nelly’s remark that it shows Heathcliff’s ‘violent nature’ is surprising: in addition to the violence I have already detailed, Hindley now beats Heathcliff for soiling Edgar, and shortly later in her narrative Nelly describes how Catherine not only pinched and slapped her, Nelly, and boxed Edgar’s ear, but shook the baby Hareton till he was ‘livid’. And Nelly herself had casually suggested to Heathcliff before Edgar arrived that he was small and a sissy and Heathcliff could ‘knock him down in a twinkling’ (97). Nothing is more natural in a rough country setting than Nelly’s attitude, but there is a distinct mismatch between the objective nature of the apple sauce incident and the way she shades her portrayal of Heathcliff in relation to it. Through this disconnect between reality and Nelly’s account EB begins to show the way Nelly’s consciousness works. Nelly takes the pecking-order aggressivity of her group as a matter of course, while judging Heathcliff according to a more stringent standard of behaviour. Yet the judgement of Heathcliff as having a violent nature is less motivated on a moral than an aesthetic level, for it is a storyteller’s choice, one that prepares the way for the ‘Gothic’ element that she will accentuate as her account of Heathcliff develops. The incident with the colt shows that Heathcliff as a child has the opposite of a violent nature: it shows the cold self-control and acquisitiveness that will later manifest itself fully in him as the mechanical persistence of his life-urge, with its nisus toward property and status, even when life becomes a perpetual agony to him. This side of his personality, which is rooted in his earliest childhood, is, along with his devotion to Catherine, the most consistent element of his portrayal. When he first comes to the Heights, Nelly says that he ‘seemed a sullen,

­142    Spirit Becomes Matter patient child; hardened, perhaps, to ill treatment; he would stand Hindley’s blows without winking or shedding a tear’ (79). When he returns from exile, during the peaceful period of his visits to the Grange, Nelly strikes a related note: ‘He retained a great deal of the reserve for which his boyhood was remarkable, and that served to repress all startling demonstrations of feeling’ (139). What Heathcliff is remembered for, of course, is, precisely, startling demonstrations of feeling; but when we combine Nelly’s observations with Catherine’s remark that, as opposed to Hindley, Heathcliff has a ‘strong head’ that will preserve him from danger (138), the picture emerges of the steady, self-controlled Heathcliff who will eventually become master of Heights and Grange. Only Catherine is capable of driving him to lose control. Heathcliff’s own violent rhetoric supports the impression of him that Nelly, Isabella and, in a single speech, Catherine give; but even in the second half of the novel he is mostly restrained in his violence. In the first half, he issues bloodcurdling threats, especially against Hindley and Edgar, yet never actually initiates any of the violence he threatens. He says he has come back to the area to kill Hindley, but never lays hands on him until Hindley tries to kill him. This beating is brutal, but Heathcliff stops well short of murder, even under the cover of self-defence; and Isabella’s description of him as exerting ‘preter-human self-denial’ to keep from killing Hindley does not harmonise either with the fact that Heathcliff then bandages him with his own hands, or the convincing account Heathcliff gives late in the novel of his agonised state of mind the night of the beating, when Catherine had just been buried and his thoughts were very far from anything to do with revenging himself on his foster brother (213; 321). His desire to see Catherine’s ghost that night was so absorbing that all he remembers is ‘stopping to kick the breath out of [Hindley]’ (321) in his agonised rush to the room he once shared with her. Apart from this, the most appalling violence he inflicts is not on others but on himself, when, as Nelly reports, he beats his head bloody against a tree in Catherine’s garden, on the night of her death. His Senecan revenge-rhetoric against Edgar (‘I would have torn his heart out, and drunk his blood!’ (185)) issues only in his pushing Edgar’s chair, in response to which Edgar strikes him a staggering blow on the neck (154).18 Thus both the men he most hates, and who represent all the forces that oppress him socially and tear him from Catherine, attack him first, and he never actually lays a hand on Edgar. The list of his acts of aggression against the Lintons is laughable: throwing apple sauce at Edgar and pushing his chair, hanging Isabella’s little dog (which, however, does not die) with a handkerchief, and shaking Isabella once.19 When we consider that Catherine has warned Isabella that Heathcliff

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would crush her ‘like a sparrow’s egg’, and he has told Catherine he would rip Isabella’s fingers off, the gap between rhetoric and action is striking.20 He is less restrained with the second Catherine; he slaps her ears violently, but only after he has warned her and she has responded by scratching and biting him (302); and another time he strikes her brutally on the face, again when she defies his verbal command (313). This is bad, and I do not want to defend it in any way; but it is one thing to judge this violence by our own standards of humanity, and another to judge it in the context of the ambient violence of the novel. In this context, even Heathcliff’s increased physical violence in the second half of the novel is scarcely ‘diabolical’, as Nelly calls it (302); he does not strike Catherine Linton habitually or for wanton pleasure, only in response to her defiance, and, in both of the cases I have mentioned, interestingly, when they are struggling for possession of an object.21 By comparison, consider that Catherine Linton herself, who Nelly falsely claims is less ‘furious’ than her mother, at one point gives Hareton ‘a cut’ with her whip only because he holds her horse while trying to reason with her (284); and Hareton, so schooled by her, later strikes her more than once, in response to her continual humiliation of him. Even the urbane Lockwood early in the story contemplates boxing Hareton’s ears (56), and later he sees, and approves of, a blow Hareton gives Catherine (333).22 Everything that leads to the judgements of Heathcliff as fiend and devil is instantiated first by Hindley: the sadism and violence (including toward his own son), the vengefulness, the avarice, the intensity of attachment to a woman and inability to get over her death, the consequent turn to blasphemy rather than faith, and the attempt to reduce a younger version of himself to a state of serfdom. These parallels, along with the Gothic spin Nelly gives to her portrayal of Heathcliff, have, apparently, led readers to confuse the two, and to attribute Hindley’s over-the-top violence of act and speech equally to Heathcliff; but, while Hindley serves as a model for the style of masculinity Heathcliff develops – in particular, he learns to curse and to threaten mayhem like Hindley – unlike Hindley, Heathcliff is not naturally inclined to physical violence, and never lets his passions cause him to lose sight of his calculated aims.

Heathcliff the Lover When Catherine learns of Isabella’s infatuation with Heathcliff, she warns her that he is an ‘unreclaimed creature’ and ‘a fierce, pitiless,

­144    Spirit Becomes Matter wolfish man’ whom she must not imagine to ‘conceal depths of benevolence and affection’, and who will ‘crush her like an eggshell’ (141). Catherine speaks of Heathcliff as one who knows him most intimately; yet the novel reports nothing in her own experience of him to that point that supports her characterisation. As Isabella quite reasonably objects to Nelly, on the basis of what she herself knows about him to that point, ‘Mr Heathcliff is not a fiend; he has an honourable soul, and a true one, or how could he remember her?’ (142). Indeed, if there is one thing Catherine knows about Heathcliff, it is that he carries depths of affection for her underneath his restrained exterior. She lies outright when she says he does not conceal such depths; and we have already seen how unfounded, to this point, Nelly’s claims about his violent nature are. That Catherine paints him as a pitiless, wolfish man reveals not what she, or the reader, has known him to be so far, but, rather, her need to relegate him mentally to a position compatible with her being married to Edgar. She begins working on this relegation years earlier, in the pivotal scene where she confesses to Nelly that she has decided to marry Edgar, and asks Nelly whether Heathcliff knows ‘what being in love is’, hoping Nelly will say that he does not. Nelly replies that he must know as well as Catherine does; but Catherine’s subsequent course of conduct, like her remark to Isabella, shows that she has managed to keep her imago of Heathcliff sequestered from any erotic association, by the strategy of imagining him as a strangely inhuman sort of man – one who does not know what it is to be in love. Yet, at the time that Catherine questions whether Heathcliff is capable of being in love, Heathcliff has given her no reason to doubt that he has all a man’s capacity for erotic passion, and much reason to feel that he does. The wilfulness of her mental strategy is so patent that she herself recognises it: ‘I am determined [she tells Nelly] to cheat my own conscience, and be convinced that Heathcliff has no notion of these things . . .’ (121). In fact, Heathcliff has by this point in the novel made it perfectly clear to Catherine that he is in love with her, having ceased to ‘express his fondness for her in words’ (108) only a short time before Edgar becomes her suitor, and then only because of his demoralisation by his state of degradation; and even after this, on the very day that she and Edgar ‘confess themselves lovers’, Heathcliff reveals to her that, in the most classic way – like Queen Laudine during the year of Yvain’s absence in Chretien’s Knight with the Lion – he has been keeping lover’s time, marking every day that she has been absent from him:

The Return to the Heath ( Wuthering Heights)    145 ‘. . . look at the almanack, on that wall.’ He pointed to a framed sheet hanging near the window, and continued:   ‘The crosses are for the evenings you have spent with the Lintons, the dots are for those spent with me. Do you see? I’ve marked every day.’ (109)

The state of enamoramiento, Verliebtheit (strangely, there is no noun for this celebrated state in English), that Heathcliff is in at this time, and the refined nature of his love – a certain sweetness at the core of his nature, a sweetness that only Catherine can unlock – is evident also in the courtliness and tact of his account to Nelly about the adventure at the Grange. At the end of his account he says the Lintons ‘combed her beautiful hair’ as she kindled a spark in them ‘from her own enchanting face’, and concludes enthusiastically that ‘she is so immeasurably superior to them – to everyone on earth, is she not Nelly?’ And this conventional praise of the beloved by a male lover is preceded by a different kind of praise, of a more unusual – and, to the contemporary reader, more admirable – kind. He tells Nelly that they raced to the Grange without stopping, ‘Catherine completely beaten in the race, because she was barefoot’ (89), implying that, had she not been shoeless, things would have been different; and later he adds that while the Lintons’ dog mauled her leg ‘She did not yell out – no! She would have scorned to do it, if she had been spitted on the horns of a mad cow’ (90). Heathcliff in classical fashion loves and admires her hair and her face, but in addition he admires her physical prowess and courage, as though she were a kind of beautiful Amazon. This is, of course, the state of being for which Catherine will long during her night of crisis when her terminal breakdown begins, the state from which she has been lured by her return to her normative class situation, and the coincidence of what Heathcliff loves in her with what she feels to be most essential about herself clearly indicates the fundamental nature of their bond. Nothing could be less indicative of savagery or extra-cultural passion than the kind of love Heathcliff manifests in these scenes. Despite his banishment to servants’ work, he is at this point more refined a gentleman in his feelings and desires than Edgar ever shows himself to be. He is, in fact, a ‘courtly’ lover, a ‘hero of Romance’ in just the sense that he will quite truly later, in relation to Isabella, deny being. Like the courtly lovers of Chretien and the troubadours, and like Hareton later in relation to Catherine Linton, he submits utterly to his beloved, and is willing to perform whatever ‘love service’ she requires; she is his domna, his female lord. Heathcliff obeyed old Earnshaw only when it suited him, Nelly says, but ‘he would do her bidding in anything’ (84); and in her delirium Catherine says to Heathcliff, ‘You always followed me’ (164).

­146    Spirit Becomes Matter The analogy between the Heathcliff-Catherine and Hareton-Catherine stories is well known; what has not been properly brought out is that before Catherine betrayed him Heathcliff was as innocently and ardently loving as Hareton later shows himself to be. When we see how cleanly Heathcliff breaks up into the two distinct ‘actants’ represented in their pure forms by Hindley and Hareton, we begin to see how the novel has been constructed around a major, masterful, suture. The ‘comic’ progression from Hindley to Hareton occurs behind the main action, while the tragic progression of Heathcliff from lover to Gothic villain occurs frontstage.23

Catherine’s Betrayal As Catherine has confessed to Nelly, she is determined to ‘cheat [her] own conscience’ – to neuter Heathcliff in her mind so that she can pursue her exorbitant fantasy of keeping both men. How successfully she manages to deceive herself (and most readers, who buy into her delusion of the sexlessness of this love story) is evident from her stunningly callous remark to him years later, in reply to Heathcliff’s question whether Isabella is not Edgar’s heir, that ‘Half a dozen nephews shall erase her title, please Heaven!’ (145). This remark, which directly implies her readiness for regular sexual intercourse with Edgar (while reminding Heathcliff of her own dynastic security, at a time when he is still propertyless), shows how wilfully oblivious to Heathcliff’s real erotic suffering Catherine remains at this point. Heathcliff’s characteristic restraint holds, for the last time; he calmly reiterates his established position, that what is his is always just as much Catherine’s. But he evidently broods on his wound, and the sequel to this scene is his first approach to Isabella, and the subsequent fight with Catherine – their first unrestrained fight ever, and specifically on the question of sexual jealousy. ‘“What is it to you?” he growled. “I have a right to kiss her, if she chooses, and you have no right to object – I’m not your husband, you needn’t be jealous of me!”’ – a delayed, but pointed, response to her remark days earlier about all the children she intends to bear Edgar. Catherine’s reply – that she is not at all jealous, but will facilitate his marriage to Isabella if he really likes her – is one brutal reminder too many of her erotic coldness to him, and his self-restraint entirely gives way, opening a new phase in Heathcliff’s development as a character: I want you to be aware that I know you have treated me infernally – i­ nfernally! . . . and if you flatter yourself that I don’t perceive it, you are a fool – and if you think that I can be consoled by sweet words, you are an idiot . . . (151)

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This exchange between Catherine and Heathcliff marks an end to the project of self-deception that Catherine had begun years earlier, and erases any doubt there might still be in the reader’s mind concerning the erotic nature of their relationship. For Heathcliff it has been frankly erotic for a long time, and their farewell scene will reveal that Catherine has merely been repressing her own response. On the point of death Catherine at last refuses, as Lacan says, to give ground on her desire, making her choice finally for Heathcliff, letting down the mental wall she has built against the thought of him as a lover. They fall into each other’s arms, and then for five minutes Heathcliff bestows on her ‘more kisses than ever he gave in his life before’, ‘but then’, Nelly reports, ‘my mistress had kissed him first’ (194); and Catherine refuses to let Heathcliff leave even when Nelly hears Edgar coming and Heathcliff himself anxiously tries to flee. In effect, Catherine has at that point left her husband for Heathcliff.

‘Nelly, I Am Heathcliff’ Up to that point, the social form of her desire has split her being almost, but not quite, to the core. In her case, as in Heathcliff’s, commentators have given the brief period of time when they ran wild on the heath far greater significance than the novel gives it. The real nature of her social constitution as a subject, even as she runs wild, is made sharply evident by the rapidity of her transformation into a young lady from the quasiandrogynous state that she had fallen into with Heathcliff. ‘Stay, dear, you will disarrange your curls,’ Mrs Linton says to her on her return to the Heights, as she helps her untie her hat; and Catherine ‘dare hardly touch’ either the dogs or Heathcliff himself from fear for the immaculacy of her new garments. No more than Heathcliff’s transformation on his return from exile is this an inexplicably sudden change; it is the product not of a mere five weeks at the Grange, but of an established trajectory of socialisation. By the time of her stay at the Grange, Catherine has arrived at the age at which the trappings of femininity of her culture and class begin to exert their allure even on a tomboy like her – an allure that accompanies the awakening of her interest in having a suitor. There is nothing more natural, from a realist standpoint, than that she should now return to the normative life trajectory of what she is, a woman of the gentry. ‘I shall be the greatest woman in the neighbourhood,’ she says when she tells Nelly her motives for marrying Edgar (118). The time on the heath becomes the focus of Catherine’s nostalgia once she finds herself imprisoned for life in the muted emotional atmosphere

­148    Spirit Becomes Matter of the Grange; but this scarcely indicates that the novel as a whole points toward some inconceivable jouissance as the authentic, but impossible, alternative to a necessarily inauthentic life within the constraints of language and bourgeois society. Given the way in which her and Heathcliff’s desire is actually configured in this novel, the genuine alternative to her life with Edgar would have been not a lifetime of noble savagery but life as the lady of Wuthering Heights, with Heathcliff as her squire-husband. Heathcliff loved and, she fantasises, would have nurtured her Amazon-nature – not, absurdly, by keeping her out on the heath, barefoot and dirty, but in a way appropriate to the genteel setting that neither of them ever ceases to desire. Thus after Catherine’s death Heathcliff acts out his part of the social drama by becoming the squire that he would ‘naturally’ have become if Hindley had not intervened, the squire who would have been Catherine’s ‘natural’ spouse. No doubt they would have ridden horses together on the heath, as she never does with Edgar.24 When her hallucination takes her back to the heath, Catherine does not, of course, think about the entire social context in which she might imaginably have lived with Heathcliff. Her vision of the heath at this juncture is not a conscious deliberation but a delirious intuition, in which baffled desire irresistibly reaches out to the last time at which it found itself sustained, to the only scene in which she ever knew the unimpeded, passionate companionship of her beloved, and, perhaps more important, a time when she herself had not yet been symbolically ‘castrated’ by her culture. Catherine speaks her delirium in some of the most moving prose to be found in the English novel. Yet both the tenor of her utterance at this time and the quality of the prose in which EB renders it contrast strikingly with the tenor and the prose of the passage in which, on the night when she announced to Nelly her decision to marry Edgar, Catherine spoke of her identity with Heathcliff. These two crucial passages are closely related, because in both of them Catherine attempts to articulate her deepest subjectivity. Given the importance that has commonly been assigned to Catherine’s earlier speech, the differences between the two passages call for close examination. The ‘I am Heathcliff’ speech provides the main evidence for the understanding of Catherine and Heathcliff’s love as transcendent; yet it is no more than an inflated version of something she has already said shortly before, more economically, in a way that does not stick out from the flow of her conversation with Nelly, and which also – unlike the ‘I am Heathcliff’ speech – retains its connection with the reality that she is leaving Heathcliff for another. ‘It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff

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now,’ Catherine has earlier said, ‘so he shall never know how much I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.’ Here Catherine has already stated her more-thanidentity with Heathcliff, and in a way that yields a clear interpretation: their souls are the same, but Heathcliff’s is not riven, as hers is, by what she later calls ‘whims’, so she recognises her true self in him better than she recognises it in herself. But in these remarks she also acknowledges her social motive for not marrying Heathcliff: it would ‘degrade’ her to do it. She then states the intention I have already discussed, to cheat her own conscience by convincing herself that Heathcliff does not love her. Following this comes what is, I believe, the only moment in the novel in which a character twists her self-understanding into the approved terms of moral ideology, with Nelly listening in outraged incredulity: she will marry Edgar (thereby becoming, as she has already said, ‘the greatest woman in the neighbourhood’) but she will do it in selfless service to Heathcliff, whom she will then help with Linton’s money. Then comes the ‘I am Heathcliff’ speech. This speech adds two further claims to that of her earlier-stated identity with Heathcliff: that he provides an existence ‘beyond’ her own, and that her love for him is as unchangeable as ‘the eternal rocks beneath’. Sentimental transcendentalism of this type can be kept from sounding overblown only by exceptional prose; but the prose here is not only hackneyed, it is awkward and obscure. Catherine’s description of Heathcliff as ‘one who comprehends in his person my feelings to Edgar and myself’, for example, is both oddly stiff in its diction and devoid of any sensible paraphraseable meaning (is Heathcliff supposed to ‘comprehend in his person’ the whim that is motivating her to marry Edgar?). Then there is her strangely formal question ‘What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here?’. The use of the past subjunctive in the main clause of this question instead of the modal ‘would be’ is stilted even for the period, and particularly odd for a fifteen-year-old girl who never otherwise talks like this. The altruism of ‘my great thought in living is himself’ and ‘My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries’ is not only anomalous for Catherine, it also blankly ignores the fact that she is the present cause of his greatest misery – a misery of which she has just expressed her intention to make herself unconscious. Finally, there is the enigmatic ‘Nelly, I am Heathcliff’ (122), which, coming in such a hyperbolic context, sorts oddly with the fact that this statement is actually weaker than her already-spoken ‘he is more myself than I am’. Critics have apparently felt that the transcendent passion of the

­150    Spirit Becomes Matter lovers, or certain sentiments expressed by EB in her poems, obligate them to take these inflated and incoherent pronouncements seriously. Yet Catherine is here clearly continuing her explicitly stated project of cheating her conscience. She has already mentally neutered Heathcliff, and now she seeks to convince herself that in some inconceivably profound way Heathcliff somehow blesses her intended union with his rival, so that she need not feel that she is betraying him. But it remains unclear whether EB is entirely in control of the various levels of her prose at this moment. The character of Catherine’s language seems to reflect the bad faith of her motivation in speaking it; yet, as some critics have claimed, it has echoes of what, off the evidence of her lyric poetry, appear to be EB’s own most profound convictions. What is clear is the contrast between the quality, and purport, of the prose in the ‘I am Heathcliff’ speech and that of Catherine’s speech in her delirium, which has echoes of, and stands comparison with, Shakespeare. Now there is no trace left of the mystical identification with Heathcliff that she had earlier claimed to be eternal and unalterable. Now, when she speaks of the time when they were first separated by Hindley, she puts her supreme passion in the past tense, calling Heathcliff ‘my all in all, as [he] was at the time’ (163; italics added). And when she goes on to articulate her most fervent desire, she does not mention Heathcliff at all; her wish is to be herself again, a girl, ‘half savage and hardy, and free . . . and laughing at injuries . . . I’m sure I should be myself again were I once among the heather on those hills’. The self she longs for is the Amazon-Catherine that Heathcliff worshipped, the one who would have scorned to cry out ‘if she had been spitted on the horns of a mad cow’. Here Catherine’s bond with Heathcliff is revealed as rooted in her yet more profound identification with this core self that Catherine always knows, even at the moment when she betrays it, to be her authentic self. Heathcliff was the mirror who reflected this self, and who still brings a reminiscence of it to their relation. This is the truth behind what Catherine had said when she declared herself to be Heathcliff, or that he was more herself than she was. The false position in which she places herself at that moment by her attempt to square this truth with her betrothal to Edgar Linton throws her into a pious language of self-transcendence, which depicts her self as emptied out into the Other who is Heathcliff. But nothing is less characteristic of her relation to Heathcliff than the apparent subordination of herself to his being that she then claims; in reality, he is always subordinate to her. The Catherine who laughed at injuries is the Catherine that Heathcliff learned to love as his domna, and even when she is Edgar’s wife he compares himself to a slave subdued by a tyrant, and tells her

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– once again in classical courtly fashion – that she is ‘welcome to torture [him] to death for [her] amusement’. While she does at times show him consideration, she is on the whole, in the traditional fashion of courtly love, an egotistic and despotic lover to him – to the point that when she dies, she wants, not what according to her earlier speech she should want, that Heathcliff should live on so that her existence beyond herself may persist, but that he should die as well. ‘I’ll not lie there by myself: they may bury me twelve feet deep . . . but I won’t rest till you are with me . . .’ (164). The notion of Heathcliff as transcendent container of her existence coheres with none of this.

Nelly’s Cruelty The class situation of literary critics, and our distaste for petit bourgeois morality, has facilitated our identification with the exorbitant desires of Catherine and Heathcliff, and has correspondingly impeded our ability to recognise Nelly as another ‘centre of the world’, subject to her own iron necessity that carries with it a pathos at least equally worthy of sympathy and respect. Yet Wuthering Heights is as much the story of the self-assertion of this subaltern woman – a woman of tremendous vigour, resiliency and aggressivity – as it is the story of Heathcliff and Catherine. In fact, EB so subtly communicates Nelly’s own story through her role as narrator that Nelly is represented with incomparably greater realist exactitude than either Heathcliff or Catherine. An adequate full-scale account of this representation remains to be written; here I can only sketch its outlines. Heathcliff’s spell as a servant and his usurpation of the ‘little prince’ Hareton creates a kind of class fake-out that generations of ideologically motivated critics have been eager to believe in, but neither of them is an authentic subaltern subject. Nelly is the real focus of class pathos in this novel; a servant like her, however, cannot indulge the fantasies of fulfilment that Heathcliff and Catherine indulge and that readers find so compelling. The pathos of Nelly’s situation is hinted at with EB’s usual economy, in the two occasions on which the threat of her being cast into destitution is evoked. The first time is a mere hint: old Earnshaw throws her out of the house for collaborating with Hindley and Catherine in their early mistreatment of Heathcliff. She does not ‘consider [her] banishment perpetual’ and comes back ‘a few days afterwards’ (78), but we are left to wonder what the little motherless girl did during those days of homelessness. The second time is more serious, and plays a crucial role in the plot. This is when Edgar scolds her, in part for having created

­152    Spirit Becomes Matter the problem between him and Catherine that has led to her illness and delirium by bringing to him the ‘tale’ of Heathcliff’s most recent visit, during which Heathcliff and Catherine have had their decisive quarrel. When she defends herself, he tells her ‘The next time you bring a tale to me, you shall quit my service, Ellen Dean’ (166). The fear of dismissal that Edgar instils in Nelly then helps to motivate her compliance with Heathcliff’s demand that she open the way to his final visit to Catherine: ‘I remembered Mr Edgar’s stern rebuke of my carrying tales,’ she tells Lockwood (190). The fate of a servant woman without service, at this time, in this place, would be incomparably harsher than that of a sturdy labourer like the runaway Heathcliff. These reminders of Nelly’s dependent position point toward something of the ‘sharp discipline’ that she tells Lockwood, without expanding, that she has ‘undergone’ (103). We are also reminded of her subaltern status by Catherine’s mistreatment of her, verbal and physical (‘You want setting in your right place!’ she says to her when Nelly criticises Heathcliff for kissing Isabella), mistreatment that is normal for the time and situation but that would, by anyone not inured to it, be felt as humiliating, and which evidently has even in the centuries in which it was normal built up resentment in servants.25 ‘I own I did not like her, after her infancy was past,’ Nelly tells Lockwood, ‘and I vexed her frequently by trying to bring down her arrogance’ (106). Nelly’s resistance to Catherine’s efforts to dominate her, and her own reciprocal, sometimes marvellously subtle, efforts to dominate Catherine, represent one of the most masterfully achieved elements of EB’s physio-psychological realism. Her intimacy with Catherine as a result of having grown up with her results in the partial erasing of the formal boundary of the master-servant relation, such that, while Nelly generally obeys Catherine as she should, she indulges her sadistic impulses towards her in ways an ordinary servant could not, even when Catherine grows very weak. Nelly’s meddling is important from a plot standpoint, but what is more interesting is the psychology of her meddling when it is motivated by her aggressivity toward Catherine – especially at the turning point of the novel, the series of events that leads to Catherine’s fatal illness. Nelly does not report Catherine’s illness to Edgar at first because she takes it to be no more than a gambit on Catherine’s part to gain the upper hand in her quarrel with Edgar, and is determined to frustrate Catherine’s wilfulness; but when she learns how desperately ill Catherine is she becomes only marginally more sympathetic to her (160–4), and when Edgar shows up she still tries to convince him that Catherine’s illness ‘is nothing’ (165). And when Catherine at the end of the farewell scene passes out, Nelly thinks of it as good riddance. ‘She’s fainted or dead . . . so much the better.

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Far better that she should be dead, than lingering a burden and miserymaker to all about her’ (199). If Nelly seems culpable to us for her failure of compassion toward Catherine during the latter’s final decline, that is because she sees her mistress completely without sentimentality, as a privileged, spoiled, bourgeois woman who has been desperately unhappy living within constraints that to Nelly, as to anyone of her class and station, look permissive indeed, and who has wilfully made the bed she now lies in. With her robust country-woman’s attitude toward weakness and strength, illness and health, Nelly is our best guide to the physio-­ psychological morality of the novel, in particular with respect to the most morally problematic element of the book: Heathcliff’s treatment of his pathetic son Linton, whom he allows to die without medical attention. Only in this does Heathcliff manifest that inhuman cruelty that is misleadingly attributed to him from the time when Catherine warns Isabella against him.26 Yet EB makes Heathcliff’s treatment of Linton seem less monstrous than it would appear in any less tendentious realism, not only by making Linton objectively as loathsome as an innocent child can well be, but by having Nelly viscerally second Heathcliff’s loathing of his son. Nelly shares Heathcliff’s revulsion because she instinctively values the strong, masculine man over the weak, effeminate man, a valuation first visible when she rallies Heathcliff’s spirits by telling him he could easily knock Edgar down, then scrubs the apple sauce from Edgar’s face with a dish-cloth ‘rather spitefully’, telling him ‘it served him right for meddling’ (99). It is true that later she takes Edgar’s side against Catherine, and speaks well of his moral qualities to Lockwood, but her original judgement of Edgar remains active. When commenting to Lockwood about Edgar’s portrait, she says that ‘he wanted spirit in general’. Lockwood, who has been looking at the portrait, has immediately before remarked of Edgar’s figure that it was ‘almost too graceful’ (107); thus Nelly’s feeling, corroborated by Lockwood – the two ‘morally correct’ narrators – continues to second Heathcliff’s contempt for Edgar’s lack of masculinity. The slightly epicene physio-psychological nature of the Linton men is then made explicit when Nelly describes Linton Heathcliff as a ‘pale, delicate, effeminate boy, who might have been taken for my master’s younger brother’ (325). The second Catherine, who is initially much in the grip of class attitudes, is grief-stricken on meeting Hareton by the thought that she might have a cousin who is not ‘a gentleman’s son’ (230), and she further displays her indifference to physio-psychology by caring so much for Linton. Nelly, in contrast, on the one hand mentally dissents from Catherine’s class disapproval of him on the basis of Hareton’s

­154    Spirit Becomes Matter physio-psychological superiority, noting that Hareton is ‘well-made, athletic’, ‘stout and healthy’, with a ‘fearless nature’ (231) – all qualities that Heathcliff shares with Hareton – and, on the other hand, surveys with regret Linton’s physical inferiority to Heathcliff (241). She believes Heathcliff has not physically mistreated Hareton because Hareton’s robust physio-psychological nature ‘offered no temptation to that course of oppression’, having ‘none of the timid susceptibility that would have given zest to ill-treatment, in Heathcliff’s judgement’ (231). This remark appears to imply moral censure of ‘Heathcliff’s judgement’; yet it also suggests that there is something about timid susceptibility that naturally brings out the cruelty of the more aggressive, and that Nelly has a sharp intuitive understanding of this circuit. That her own aggressivity is similarly constituted is visible in the way that, from the outset, she drains all the pathos from her account of Linton’s pitiable situation, encouraging Lockwood, along with the reader, to withhold sympathy from the boy. He is a weak and sickly child, recently orphaned, exhausted from a three-hundred-mile journey by horse-drawn carriage; but the first things Nelly notes about him – while he is still asleep in the carriage – are his effeminate appearance and his ‘sickly peevishness’ (235), and she reports no feeling at all on her part when she abandons him to Heathcliff’s mercy at the Heights and hears him crying ‘Don’t leave me’ (244).27 To Nelly, Linton is another excess puppy, the runt of a litter, and is better off dead. She calls him a ‘perishing monkey’ to his face; ‘Happily, as Mr Heathcliff conjectured,’ she says later to Catherine Linton, ‘he will not win twenty! . . . and small loss to his family, whenever he drops off . . .’ (275). She does nothing to hasten his death, but Heathcliff merely brings to pass, in a way that Nelly disapproves, an eventuality that in itself Nelly considers simply in the nature of things, and rather desirable than otherwise. This takes us deep into Emily Brontëan moral psychology, which posits a self-reinforcing circuit between cruelty and physio-­psychological weakness. The novel in no way portrays Nelly’s impulses of this kind in order to discredit her claim to be a moral person; they are presented, rather, as the expression of a rough, healthy countryperson’s regard for psycho-physical vitality. All the characters in this novel line up on one side or the other of the major physio-psychological divide between strong and weak, except for Catherine Earnshaw. She begins on the side of health, but is eventually reduced to a state of physical weakness and immobilisation that is, in fact, comparable to that of Linton Heathcliff. Heathcliff fell in love with the Amazon Catherine, and his bond with her is so deep that no physiological change can weaken it – at least not within the brief time at

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hand, and under the circumstances of forced separation (we know what happens to romance when the time frame lengthens). But Nelly’s sadistic response to Catherine during her period of physical decline is a vigorous, healthy one, quite in line with the fundamental moral ontology of the novel. Objectively, Catherine after her illness becomes a physiological discard, more of a burden to the healthy than she is worth; all she can do for Heathcliff is torment his nerves and beckon him toward death.

Vivisection of Linton The riddle of the novel’s structure – of the long interruption of the Heathcliff-Catherine story after her death, when the second Catherine takes centre stage – begins to come clear once the physio-psychological dynamics of its plot are understood. The turn of genre from the first, tragic, to the second, grotesque, love story (that of the younger Catherine and Linton Heathcliff) is wrenching; the terms of the narrative contract are revised in a way that many readers have not been willing to accept. Hence this story has been almost completely ignored by interpreters, even the ones who do notice the third, comic-romantic love story.28 Yet the reader has already had to negotiate the transition from the register of farce in the Lockwood narration to that of unhinged Byronism in the great farewell scene, touching on a variety of intermediate registers – such as courtly love – along the way. That this is an art romance, and its author intends to play boldly with generic registers, holding all the controlling threads in her fingers, has thus been evident from the beginning. To judge from the criticism, very sophisticated readers have responded very naïvely to having to give up the cathartic emotion of the great central love story and focus their attention on less exalted material, treating the second half of the novel as the best EB could do after having exhausted her superior material. Yet the second half is crafted as masterfully as the first – more masterfully, perhaps, in the sense that, if less moving, it has fewer flaws. And through all the shifts of narrator, genre and linguistic register, the affective logic that results in the return to centre stage of Heathcliff’s passion maintains a strict continuity. The entire second half is the rigorous working out of Heathcliff’s grief-driven vengefulness, up to the point at which his rage can be fully converted back into grief; and the logic of this working out runs right through Linton Heathcliff. With respect to his son, Heathcliff at last becomes the pitiless, remorseless avenger that up to this point he restrains himself from becoming; but he does so in a modern, ‘civilised’, way that is consistent with his fundamental character as I have described

­156    Spirit Becomes Matter it – a way that remains sufficiently within the law to insulate him from punishment, yet which is more chilling than anything overtly Gothic that Heathcliff does in the novel. And the novel as a whole seems to countenance this vengeance, to treat it as a straightforward consequence of the nature of physio-psychological causality. It is not just the spin that Nelly puts on her narration that makes Heathcliff’s son repellent; in the world of Wuthering Heights, her response to him seems justified by what he objectively is. By the time he dies, Linton has become so vile that his suffering and death carry little or none of the pathos that the death of an essentially blameless (if intensely unappealing) youth might be expected to carry. Heathcliff’s treatment of him, monstrous as it is, must be, and is, rendered, if not justifiable, at least understandable, so that sympathy for Linton will not stand in the way of the return, in the service of the novel’s closure, of the boy’s tormentor’s pathos. On the whole, EB seems to have been successful in securing continued sympathy for Heathcliff despite his worst behaviour. Kettle, in a formulation that I think captures the essence of a wide spectrum of subsequent readings, argues that Heathcliff retains our sympathy throughout this dreadful section of the book because instinctively we recognize a rough moral justice in what he has done to his oppressors and because, though he is inhuman, we understand why he is inhuman . . . We recognize that the very forces which drove him to rebelling for a higher freedom have themselves entrapped him in their own values and determined the nature of his revenge.29

Linton Heathcliff, however, is scarcely one of Heathcliff’s ‘oppressors’. If it is possible vaguely to lump him in with this group, it is because EB has made it easy not to mind too much what Heathcliff does to him. And yet, EB has also made what Heathcliff does to him as appalling as it can be. EB has visibly intended to make Linton as helpless a victim, and as sensitive a receptor of pain, and also to make Heathcliff as cruel and heartless a victimiser and inflictor of pain on Linton, as possible, under the constraint of retaining the possibility of a certain kind of sympathy with Heathcliff. This is, evidently, the compositional rule under which the drama of the second love story is played out. The image of Linton is generated imaginatively as the precise corollary, in EB’s dialectic of sadism, of Heathcliff’s vengeful aggressivity, which here assumes its truest form. Linton becomes the physio-psychological attractor of all the force of Heathcliff’s sadism – which can then disappear along with his son, so that the novel can turn toward closure. Heathcliff’s aggressivity never primarily takes the form of physical

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violence; it is a more cerebral, though not less visceral, kind of violence that is characteristic of him. This is already the nature of his cruelty toward Isabella, and even pushing Edgar’s chair is a form of psychological cruelty. He does not need ingenious pain-inflicting devices like Hindley’s bizarre bayonet-tipped pistol; he inflicts blows when necessary to enforce his will, but only then. Linton, correlatively, begins as a sickly, puling, almost incapacitated creature, and eventually becomes little more than a writhing sac of sensitive nerve-plasm endowed with the maximum possible receptivity to psychological pain, in one astonishing scene debasing himself, as Catherine Linton says, to an ‘abject reptile’, his ‘nerveless frame’ thrown on the ground, ‘convulsed with exquisite terror’ (299). Heathcliff need not even touch Linton to terrorise him. ‘My father threatened me, and I dread him’ is his account of how Heathcliff has made him hysterical with fear (299). ‘What was filling him with dread’, Nelly comments, ‘we had no means of discerning’ (301). But Heathcliff himself later gives Nelly a glimpse of his methods: ‘I brought him down one evening [Heathcliff tells her] . . . and just set him in a chair, and never touched him afterwards. I sent Hareton out, and we had the room to ourselves. In two hours, I called Joseph to carry him up again, and since then, my presence is as potent on his nerves as a ghost [italics added] . . . Hareton says he wakes and shrieks in the night by the hour together . . .’ (318)

For Victorian physio-psychology, the human substance is fundamentally the nervous system with its flow of nerve energy; and a ghost, most insubstantial of beings, can act on the nerves with equal, or greater, potency than a whip. Who knows this better than Heathcliff? 30 Linton’s terror calls for Heathcliff’s most blood-curdling declaration, one that might remind the modern reader of Josef Mengele: ‘It’s odd what a savage feeling I have to anything that seems afraid of me! Had I been born where laws are less strict, and tastes less dainty, I should treat myself to a slow vivisection of those two as an evening’s amusement!’ (302)

This is the nadir of Heathcliff’s decline from his days as Catherine Earnshaw’s courtly lover.31 And his actual treatment of Linton, up to this point and later, suggests that, with respect to his son at least, Heathcliff is capable of doing what he threatens. But in these remarks Heathcliff includes the bold Catherine Linton as well as his own son in his vision of slow vivisection, and this appears to imply what, by the laws of EB’s physio-psychology, would be an unnaturally voracious sadism. In fact, however, Heathcliff entirely misconceives Catherine as a suitable object of his sadism – and she very quickly disabuses him of this

­158    Spirit Becomes Matter mistake. Having heard him express his desire to vivisect her and Linton, she steps close up to him, ‘her black eyes flashing with passion and resolution’, as Nelly reports, and exclaims in his face: ‘I’m not afraid of you!’ This is a wonderful moment in the novel – the turning point of its physio-psychological dialectic. Catherine’s retort gets her ears severely boxed, but it gives Heathcliff his first notice that with limited violence and mere threats of worse – the means he has used with Isabella and his son – he can dominate, but not terrorise, this spirited young woman. Catherine is, like Hareton, a strong, healthy, aggressive organism (who has herself, recall, previously given Hareton a taste of her whip), and, while she must bow to Heathcliff’s physical mastery, even in the darkest times she holds her place in his household with a modicum of dignity. How little his terror goes to her heart is shown, after she and Hareton become friends, by her game of sticking primroses in Hareton’s porridge at breakfast, making her lover laugh under the very nose of the ogre. We, today, cannot afford EB’s clean conscience about her eugenic standpoint; but the Victorians thought strong, healthy animals can take a lot of physical punishment, and, by a rule of physio-psychology, the more they can take, the less inclined the punisher is to deal it out to them. Looking back over the novel from this point, we can see that all those who arouse Heathcliff’s sadism – Edgar, Isabella, Hindley and his own son Linton – have some form of vitiated physio-psychology. Nelly, who shares Heathcliff’s robustness, as well as his contempt for physiological weakness, always gets along as well with him as circumstances permit, despite the fact that she has ample cause to turn against him, and a ‘touch on the chest’ is the worst violence Heathcliff ever inflicts on her (303). The fathers in the novel, old Earnshaw and Heathcliff, prefer their adoptive sons on physio-psychological grounds. Heathcliff explicitly states his preference for Hareton over Linton on these grounds, and the strong symmetry between the two father-son pairs strengthens the more subtle suggestions I explored at the beginning of this essay, that Earnshaw’s preference for Heathcliff over Hindley has the same cause. The true line of inheritance, in EB’s world, is the line, not of genes, but of physiological vigour. This vigour asserts itself conclusively, and concludingly, in the love of Hareton and Catherine Linton. This conclusion has been criticised for putting a domestic happy ending to the novel; but its apparently nambypamby nature is underlain by a physio-psycho-logic that remorselessly dispenses with the weak. The union of Hareton and Catherine Earnshaw is the triumph of physiological vigour more than it is that of domesticity. Seen in terms of the architecture of the novel, this final love story shares with the two frame narrations the function of placing the central

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tragedy within a larger world, a world that is not sucked into the vortex of the doomed lovers’ passion and death. We should never forget that the tragedy is framed, and the third love story is one of the crucial elements of this framing. Its formal counterbalancing function (as comedy that balances tragedy) is, however, transparent – unlike that of the frame narrations, which will be the topic of the final section of this chapter.

The Ultimate Dissolution The necessary condition for the novel’s turn toward closure is, then, that all the physiologically vitiated actors of the central drama should be dead and gone from the story, and only the strong, vigorous Hareton and Catherine remain, as ‘the only objects which retain a distinct material appearance’ to Heathcliff (353). His son Linton is the final piece that has to fall, and when he dies Heathcliff can no longer find a motive for vengeance. The culminating sequence of events begins on the day of Edgar Linton’s funeral. On this day, Heathcliff chooses to unearth Catherine’s coffin once again, as he had done eighteen years earlier. This time he sees her face, which, he says, is ‘still hers’ (319). The chapel graveyard, Lockwood has informed us early on, is located ‘near a swamp’, and the ‘peaty moisture’ has preserved Catherine’s face, like that of the ‘bog bodies’ of which EB had evidently heard (65). Seeing her face again marks the beginning of the decisive change in Heathcliff; the night after this, he tells Nelly, for the first time in eighteen years Catherine’s ghost does not torment him. He is tranquil, dreaming that he is dead and lying in the grave next to her. Nelly, who shares his instinctive feeling for physio-psychology, unlike him recoils from its final manifestation, beyond the oppositions of weakness and strength, health and illness, in the death and decomposition of the body. When Heathcliff tells her what he has done, her thoughts go immediately to the physical reality of the decaying corpse that this implies, assuming, apparently, that Heathcliff has thoughtlessly failed to consider that this is what he might have seen, and has been saved by mere chance from a horrific sight. ‘And if she had been dissolved into earth, or worse, what would you have dreamt of then?’ she asks. But Heathcliff replies: ‘Of dissolving with her, and being more happy still! . . . Do you suppose I dread any change of that sort? I expected such a transformation on raising the lid, but I’m better pleased that it should not commence till I share it.’ (320)

­160    Spirit Becomes Matter This is the most remarkable utterance in Wuthering Heights. The Christian doctrine of eternal life is formulated in reaction to the fear that in the final instance the human substance succumbs to organic reduction as its absolute destiny. It is true that, as against pre-Christian pure pneumaticisms, Christianity made a special place for the human sarx, ‘flesh’, first in the form of the Incarnation of Jesus, then in the promise of the resurrection of the soma, ‘body’, at the last day. But, as Paul says, ‘all sarx is not the same sarx’; there is for Christianity a corruptible flesh associated with the merely mortal breath of life, the psyche, and there is another flesh that has been infused with pneuma, the principle of immortal life, by the sacrifice of Christ.32 The psychic body, psychikon soma, dies and rots; but for the believer in Christ the sting is taken out of death, because she believes that she will rise again, incorruptible, as pneumatikon soma. For Christianity in all its historically dominant forms, existence is, as Rudolf Bultmann wrote, ‘sheerly unintelligible’ without Christ’s promise of ‘freedom from death’; the rotting of the flesh, if it were the unsurpassable terminus of human life, would be the most dreadful, the most unbearable, of realities. But Christianity assures the believer that it is not the end.33 Heathcliff’s revelations about digging up Catherine’s coffin, and his reasons for doing so, make clear at last that the ‘dark’ movement of forces in Wuthering Heights is not demonic, supernatural or metaphysical, but chthonic. The chthon in ancient Greek was the soil in its interior aspect – sunless, hidden, ominous dwelling place of death and decomposition. In its elaborately mythologised aspect, the chthonic realm was the underworld, the dwelling of deities like Persephone and Hecate; but in its immediate, felt reality it was the near subsurface, the place in which seeds and the dead – especially the dead – are buried. The chthon is the earth as womb-tomb, matrix of entirely mortal life, in its most threatening aspect as scene of the putrefaction of the body – scene of horrormovie nightmare, the nightmare that all thought of ideal transcendence beginning with Plato, all religious belief of the Christian type, attempts to escape. For Heathcliff, by contrast, the grave causes not nightmare but tranquil dreams; he knows the chthon for what it is, knows that it is his destiny and longs for it because it has already claimed Catherine. Heathcliff never gives a hint of belief in, or longing for, any destiny of human life beyond its return to its elements, nor does he have any need for such a belief: he can look straight at the decomposed human form without dread. He would have looked without horror at Catherine’s decomposed features, he says, and looks forward to sharing the final change with her. ‘I am within sight of my heaven,’ he says, ‘. . . hardly three feet to sever me.’ Because there is no horror in his response to the

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dead and decaying body, neither is there Gothic morbidity nor ‘dark side Romanticism’ in it; he yearns for the grave because the mortal being who alone could heat to essential life the core of his otherwise cold nature lies there. But if he does not dread death-and-decomposition, neither does he rush forward to embrace it, until the final ecstasy takes hold of him. ‘How can I live without my life?’ he had cried when he knew Catherine must die; and because he loves his life in her in this way his final choice of death is his affirmation of life, the only affirmation of which he is capable. It is not one that provides any model for imitation, and yet there is something in it that marks a foray into the mystery of sexed mortal being that perhaps no previous work of literature had ever made. Heathcliff carries to its conclusion the movement aborted by Milton’s Adam, whose initial reaction to Eve’s revelation that she has eaten of the fruit, and is thus consigned to death, is expressed in these words: ‘If death consort with thee, death is to me as life.’ Unlike Heathcliff, however, Adam is unable to sustain this resolve.34 Because Heathcliff’s consummating ecstasy is predicated on the denial of the fundamental doctrine of Christianity, the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, his love affair with the grave marks the deepest descent of EB’s meditation on human life in Wuthering Heights. Through the person of Heathcliff, she draws the ultimate spiritual and emotional consequences of biological materialism – consequences Nietzsche for his part was never able fully to accept (see Nietzsche’s Voice) – and does so in the most heightened dramatic form. Heathcliff’s consummation reveals EB’s vision in this novel as sexual, erotic, from beginning to end. The passion he feels for Catherine, and that Catherine before she dies reciprocates, is the kind of eros that carries death within it, the thoroughly mortal eros of the sexual body. As the holy men who seek eternal life know, this kind of death is the price that must be paid for this kind of eros; and nowhere else in literature is this price paid in a more extravagant fashion than in Wuthering Heights. A few years later, Baudelaire would struggle, more equivocally than EB does here, with this same problematic, in poems such as ‘The Flagon’, ‘A Carrion’ and ‘Metamorphoses of a Vampire’.

A Strange Change Approaches When Heathcliff digs up his lover’s coffin the first time, he experiences her as his Paraclete (he is ‘unspeakably consoled’; ‘her presence was with me,’ he says), but then for eighteen years the presence of her invisible ghost keeps making him wild to actually see her, and keeps his nerves at

­162    Spirit Becomes Matter ‘such a stretch’ that only their resemblance to ‘catgut’ keeps them from relaxing ‘to the feebleness of Linton’s’ (321). Lockwood, of course, has seen this ghost in his nightmare; but the question sometimes debated by critics, of whether the ghost he sees is real, considered in strictly empirical terms, misses the far more exigent reality of spirit that, as Plato says in Phaedo, is ‘full of body when it departs’, and remains earth-bound because it has been crucified to the body by the experience of violent pleasures and pains. . . . every pleasure and every pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together. It makes the soul corporeal, so that it believes that truth is what the body says it is. As it shares the beliefs and delights of the body . . . it inevitably comes to share its ways and manner of life and is unable ever to reach Hades in a pure state; it is always full of body when it departs . . . (83c–e)   . . . the soul that is passionately attached to the body . . . hovers around it and the visible world for a long time, struggling and suffering much . . . (108ab)35

The ghost, thus, lives on not as the transcendence of body but as the body’s refusal to be transcended. Catherine and Heathcliff are precisely the sort of beings of whom Plato speaks in the passage above, passionately involved with the beliefs and delights of the body and sharing its ways; hence Catherine’s intuition that heaven is not her home, and her experience of waking up from her dream of heaven, ‘sobbing for joy’, back ‘on top of the heath’ in Wuthering Heights. The second time Heathcliff digs her up, he does not stop short of looking at her face, and this leaves him ‘pacified – a little’, but only for the time being, and it isn’t long before his agony returns. Heathcliff at the end of this novel is in precisely the same state as St John Rivers at the end of Jane Eyre, St John Rivers who expresses his desire by quoting St John of the Apocalypse; only, Heathcliff has a diametrically opposed apocalypse in view from that of the two St Johns. ‘There is a strange change approaching,’ he tells Nelly. ‘I have a single wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it . . . I’m convinced it will be reached – and soon – because it has devoured my existence: I am swallowed in anticipation of its fulfilment’ (353–4). Nevertheless, Heathcliff is a long time from the final change at this point. First everything around him must change, so that, by the physiopsycho-logic of this tale, he can at last be free of the project of vengeance that has gripped him all this time. His son Linton must die, he must become master of Grange as well as Heights, and then Catherine and Hareton must perform their repetition of his love story, in a fashion that is for him so uncannily precise, although in reverse (tragedy become

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comedy), that it throws him into a hallucinatory state. Once the messy work of killing off the physiologically vitiated Linton Heathcliff has been done, the third love story becomes enchanting, in a completely different register from the first one; it shows how complete EB’s novelistic gift was, and its art would be well worth considering in itself if we had the time. It doesn’t resolve or harmonise the first love story, and it is senseless to measure it by the standard of passion the first story sets, as even some very fine critics have done. For the reader it provides a fantasised compensation for the fulfilment denied Heathcliff and his Catherine; for Heathcliff it can only intensify his sense of loss. But it is necessary for the revision of Heathcliff’s social exterior to be complete, so that there will no longer be any context for his vengeance, and all that is left for him to see when he looks out at his world is the acting out, as in a dream, of the fulfilment that was never his. When he looks out at Hareton and Catherine, increasingly what he sees is himself and his own Catherine. The last time he raises his hand to strike is when Catherine Linton once more maliciously provokes him, this time thinking – wrongly, as it turns out – that she can get Hareton to defend her, and the sight of her face suddenly disarms Heathcliff: He had his hand in her hair; Hareton attempted to release the locks, entreating him not to hurt her that once. His black eyes flashed, he seemed ready to tear Catherine in pieces, and I was just worked up to risk coming to the rescue, when of a sudden, his fingers relaxed, he shifted his grasp from her head, to her arm, and gazed intently in her face – Then, he drew his hand over his eyes, stood a moment to collect himself apparently . . . (350)36

He lets her go and sends her out of his sight, but later has Nelly call her down to the dinner table. That evening, when Hareton and Catherine look at him, Nelly is struck by the resemblance of their faces, and especially their eyes, to those of Catherine Earnshaw, and evidently Heathcliff is also. Immediately after this he makes his speech to Nelly about how he has lost ‘the faculty of enjoying their destruction’ (352–3). This is the completion of the process that began, on one side, with his seeing the dead, but undecomposed, face of Catherine Earnshaw in her coffin on the night of Edgar’s funeral, and, on the other, with Catherine Linton’s telling him that she was not afraid of him. (The tightness of the affective logic by which EB works out the narrative is astonishing.) For all the power of this face, it is not, Heathcliff declares, the resemblance to it of either Catherine’s or Hareton’s faces that is ‘most potent to arrest’ his imagination, because he sees her face everywhere, always, and has done so for eighteen years. What is unique to this moment is that now he sees himself, his own passion and suffering, in ‘the thousand

­164    Spirit Becomes Matter forms of past associations’ awakened by Hareton in his relation to Catherine Linton (353); ‘the ghost of my immortal love, of my wild endeavours to hold my right, my degradation, my pride, my happiness, and my anguish’ (354). As for Catherine’s face, he says, I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree – filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object, by day I am surrounded by her image! The most ordinary faces of men, and women, my own features mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and I have lost her!

If the chthonic aspect of Heathcliff’s passion is strange to us, nothing could be more familiar than this feeling that he now articulates. It is the common experience of fresh mourning, perhaps never better articulated, in which, indeed, the entire world becomes a dreadful collection of memoranda that the lost one did exist, and is lost. The only difference from the common experience – but what a difference! – is that Heathcliff keeps it fresh for eighteen years. Nothing is more unbearable than fresh mourning, and nothing could be more inconceivably agonising than never to experience any relenting of it, year after year. This is the maximum figure of EB’s poem, the hyperbole, perhaps transcending all other poetic hyperboles that have ever been conceived, almost unbearable to contemplate if one does not come well wadded against the memory of fresh mourning: the image of a person who grieves interminably with all the intensity of the original moment of loss.37 Perhaps no real human being could endure such mourning; but from the beginning of the novel EB makes it imaginable how Heathcliff could do so. The same ‘sullen, patient child’ who would ‘stand Hindley’s blows without winking or shedding a tear’, but who got compensation for those blows from Hindley in the form of his colt, and who has loved Catherine from always with the absolute devotion of a courtly lover, is the Heathcliff who endures his grief and longing for eighteen years while looking for material compensation for his loss from those he holds responsible. He only makes the violence of his grief visible once, the night of Catherine’s death. This is one of the scenes by means of which Nelly purveys the notion of Heathcliff as an inhuman creature: ‘He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and spears’ (204). But self-mutilation is an ancient and widespread response to grief over the death of a loved one (in the Iliad, the wives of slain warriors rip their own faces with their nails), and nothing could be less animal-like, or more expressive of Heathcliff’s

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humanity, than the extremity of mourning, rooted in love, that produces his cries.38 No one can mourn as Heathcliff mourns, in throes of fresh mourning that never diminishes and never ends; but by means of this extraordinary conceit EB has reached deep into the truth of mourning. Fresh mourning feels irreparable and infinite, although it isn’t; and, because it feels so, and isn’t, and because one knows it isn’t, one is struck by the imperative of keeping it so. Mourning must be infinite and irreparable, if one is not to betray the dead; and Heathcliff is the trope that represents this non-betrayal. One would not normally associate Heathcliff with Tennyson, yet this irreparable mourning is exactly what the opening section of ‘In Memoriam’ desiderates: Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d   Let darkness keep her raven gloss:   Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss, To dance with death, to beat the ground, Than that the victor Hours should scorn   The long result of love, and boast,   ‘Behold the man that loved and lost, But all he was is overworn.’

It isn’t far from beating the ground in this way to beating one’s head against a tree, as Heathcliff does; and it isn’t in the least surprising that Tennyson should express such sentiments, or that this expression should have been taken to the bosom of his tightly buttoned culture, because it isn’t only savages and pagans who have these feelings, even if it’s (mostly) only the latter who express them. And, of course, it isn’t only the mourner who fears the diminution or end of mourning; so does the potential mournee. In Wuthering Heights the fear that Heathcliff might cease to mourn is articulated by Catherine in the great farewell scene, and the fear that Adam might do the same is articulated by Eve in Paradise Lost.39 But the fullest agony of such a fear is reserved for the one who is left to mourn, and whose greatest fear is that he might be consoled. Grief of this ‘excessive’ kind is sometimes thought to be a pre-eminently female thing, as in Heart of Darkness and Frost’s ‘Home Burial’, where the husband says to his still-grieving wife ‘I think . . . you overdo it a little’, and then asks her What was it brought you up to think it the thing To take your mother-loss of a first child So inconsolably – in the face of love, You’d think his memory might be satisfied – ’

­166    Spirit Becomes Matter To which she replies, But the world’s evil. I won’t have grief so If I can change it. Oh, I won’t, I won’t!

But Achilles and Heathcliff and Tennyson are there to suggest that it isn’t just a female thing.

Ghosts And now at last it’s time to speak of Lockwood, who reports all the other voices and whose own voice is therefore, strictly speaking, the only one we hear, in this entire novel. His subjectivity, even more than Nelly’s, is always ‘present’, even when it is effaced in favour of Catherine Earnshaw’s scribblings, or Nelly’s reported discourse, and further effaced by the discourses of the other characters that are embedded in Nelly’s narrative. One should attempt to keep in mind as one reads this novel that the strict formal condition of this text is that Lockwood is always there, as the consciousness that has inscribed the text and in which it initially resounds. His is the eye or ear that is at every moment seeing, reading or hearing what we then receive through his mediation, in the echo-chamber of Lockwood’s sensibility. This condition of reading is put in place by the overture of the first three chapters, which confines us for an extended period of time within Lockwood’s perspective, long enough for a quite nuanced portrait of this narrator to be developed. By the time Nelly begins her narrative, we are well acquainted with the sensibility of this listener who will receive and transmit it; and what a listener! The most extravagant of all Emily Brontë’s inspirations is that she has caused this story, of all stories, to be conveyed to us by this man. For the naïve reader, the multitude of reported voices, with even Nelly’s presence often forgotten, constitutes the substance, the immediate, living reality of Wuthering Heights. Formally, these voices are doubly distanced from our perception, through the perspectives and sensibilities of the two narrators; but the reality effect of the narrated characters and events is so powerful that the formally more immediate elements are the hardest to perceive. To perceive the architecture of the overall form of this novel it is necessary to bring one’s perception of the mediation of the two narrators up to the level of its formal saliency, yet without attempting to dispel the illusory immediacy of the narrated events. It then becomes possible to see how Brontë has orchestrated together three tonalities of experience. The reasons for choosing Nelly as the focal narrator are obvious.

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Nelly rejects the extremes of erotic passion, and judges Heathcliff and Catherine in terms of a rudimentary Christian morality; in this way she creates a space of emotional distance, and of irony, between the narration of the love story and the love story itself. Without this distance, the story would collapse into the naïveté of overblown Gothic emotion, to which it nevertheless comes dangerously close – especially in the great farewell scene, which the unsuspicious reader might read as though it were EB’s voice that narrated it. Because Nelly belongs to the same world as the story she tells, however, she is never what she claims to be, an entirely ‘cool spectator’ (195). Her affections and enmities are blunt and direct, and, within the limits of her position as a servant, she participates in the power struggles and movements of aggressivity of the two families. But, also, she rhetorically amplifies the excessiveness of the passion to which she claims she is cool, never more obviously than in the farewell scene. If she is incapable of empathising with the lovers she actually knows, she is not immune to the charms of narrated romance. She is, thus, at once distanced from, and involved in, her narrative, on at least two levels. All of this manifests extraordinarily sophisticated art on the part of Emily Brontë. But the conception of Lockwood as primary narrator takes the novel to another, wholly unprecedented, level; it makes Wuthering Heights a modernist or, at least, proto-modernist work. Lockwood is the inauthentic man of the city in the sense derided by Wordsworth, emotionally furtive, full of vanity and pretentious language; and, adding another, non-Wordsworthian dimension of inauthenticity, he entertains timid erotic fantasies about Catherine Linton, whom he is too mousy ever to touch. He has neither the personal investment in the events and persons of Nelly’s narrative, nor the investments in morality, Christian metaphysics and domestic order that determine the peculiar spin she puts on it; he is interested in the people at the Heights simply as one is interested in a good story, and is highly responsive to Nelly’s tendency to Gothicise her tale. But this is still the same kind of art as that which generates Nelly, and if this were all there is to it, Lockwood’s voice would merely add a second, cooler distance from the central drama, while perspectivising Nelly herself. However, whereas frame narrators are usually thin, sometimes barely evoked, figures (for example in The Turn of the Screw, or Heart of Darkness), EB has given Lockwood the presence of a full novelistic character in his own right. He is neither a sketch nor a caricature; his subjectivity is evoked in nuanced and complex ways. He is not merely vain; there is an edge of hysteria to his vanity that is stirred by any sense that he is outside his realm of instinctive social competence. This

­168    Spirit Becomes Matter begins with the failure of his attempts to guess the identities and roles of everyone at the Heights, so that they can be assimilated to his known domestic categories. The threat to his dignity that he begins to fear from this failure turns to hysteria when Hareton stares at him too long, and he debates whether, in response, to ‘box his ears’ (really? Lockwood box Hareton’s ears?) or ‘render [his] hilarity audibly’ (56); and when the dogs knock him to the floor and Heathcliff and Hareton laugh at him, the ‘vehemence’ of his agitation brings on ‘a copious bleeding at the nose’ (59). Later on he will not look such a fool, and at times will even evince sensitivity and tact; but in these early chapters he makes faces at Heathcliff’s dogs, mistakes dead rabbits for puppies, acts out slapstick. This opening portrayal sets up the Lockwood tonality of the frame narration. Lockwood tinges this most impassioned of love stories with farce at its narrative frame. And this slightly farcical figure will be given the last word of the novel, as he is given the first, a last word that brings tonal closure to the novel. The tonalities of meaning of the central story, of Heathcliff’s and Catherine’s voices above all, are taken up successively into the tonalities of Nelly’s and then Lockwood’s voices, such that the novel’s tonal closure depends on the way these component tonalities have been layered from the beginning. The layering of voices, of Lockwood’s over Nelly’s, and of Nelly’s over those of the primary actors, creates a stereophony by which radically dissonant – tragic, Gothic and sentimental – tonalities, with satirical and even farcical overtones, are blended into a music that is decidedly not linear, ‘fugal’, as it has been called, but harmonic in a strictly modernist sense, incorporating as much dissonance as possible, in such a way that the tragic romance harmonies at the centre, which themselves contain grotesque notes, are balanced or counterbalanced, reduced to elements in a total form. The music of Wuthering Heights is of the same type heard in the Teiresias section of The Waste Land or the ‘unknown nourishment’ passages of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, when Gregor is so moved by his sister’s violin playing; but on a vastly grander, symphonic scale. Modernist lyricism can be bought only at the price of irony, the most lyrical the most ironic. But it is difficult in the extreme to maintain the balance between irony and lyrical emotion; the lyricism must not be overdone, but if the irony obtrudes too much, this is just a new kind of sentimentality. The poet must not allow the edges of her own bitterness or disillusion or pretensions of dark knowledge to show, any more than she can display the feelingfulness of her heart. For all the élan and savage wit of the ‘typist home at teatime’ sequence that Teiresias speaks, the dominant note is of despair and unredeemable suffering; the final torque of modernist art

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has not been applied to this great passage. The inconceivable gaiety of Kafka’s malice in Metamorphosis, with its mixture of creaturely pathos and humorous grotesquery, though colder, and even more intellectual, than the ending of Wuthering Heights, is closer to the masterfulness of what EB achieves here. At the end of Wuthering Heights, the protagonists are dead, and – according to the metaphysic that Heathcliff, and probably Catherine, as well as the design of this novel, assume – permanently dead; and Lockwood makes his way to the place where they are buried. The tale has always, from its first sentence, been on its way here, to this little framed patch of ground that is both part, and not part, of the heath, where the lovers lie together at last – all three of them. Edgar as well, Heathcliff realises, will by and by join his substance to his and Catherine’s, and, surprisingly, Heathcliff seems not to mind over-much; just knowing that he will get there first satisfies him, because ‘by the time Linton gets to us he’ll not know which is which!’ (319). Their burial place does not, strictly speaking, lie inside the heath; Lockwood describes its location very precisely, and strikingly, as a fold or hollow in the interior of the heath. Lockwood says the three headstones lie ‘on the slope next the moor’ (367), and earlier he has explained that the churchyard lies ‘in a hollow, between two hills – an elevated hollow – near a swamp’ (65). The churchyard is thus both a low place, accessible to the ‘peaty moisture’ that Lockwood says embalms the bodies buried there, and also elevated, abutting on the highlands of the heath that lie on both sides. It is thus, we might say, the supplement or parergon of the heath – the heath in its most fundamental, permanent meaning for the novel, not as locus of inconceivable enjoyment but as the chthon.40 Although Catherine at the threshold of death seems somewhat to waver on this point, this terminus is what was most rigorously implied when she dreamed that she was thrown out of heaven and awoke joyously weeping back on the heath, what she necessarily chose when she decided not heaven, but the heath, was her home. But doesn’t the novel leave the door open for us to believe with a fictional suspension of disbelief that, just maybe, Heathcliff and Catherine live on, together again, as ghosts? That is what the country folk, who see them walk, say. Nelly claims, not very convincingly, that she does not believe in ghosts; but Lockwood definitely does not. He is the only person in the novel who has actually seen a ghost, but unlike its effect on many literary critics, the experience does not arouse even a twinge of superstition in him. He thinks of it as a very bad dream, and the novel provides convincing naturalistic explanations that support his interpretation, explanations Freud would have found impeccable. His mind had

­170    Spirit Becomes Matter been full of the child Catherine when he fell asleep, and his sleeping brain attempted to preserve his sleep by weaving a dream around the tapping sound at his window. It’s true that Lockwood complains of ‘ghosts and goblins’ when Heathcliff becomes enraged at him for having invaded the sacred sleeping place, but this is only a rhetorical counterattack. How little affected with fright of the supernatural he really is, how superficially he means these words, is evident from the fact that when he remembers ‘the association of Heathcliff’s with Catherine’s name in the book’ he blushes at his ‘inconsideration’, and immediately changes back to his accustomed formal diction, explaining that reading Catherine’s name ‘often over’ had produced in him ‘an impression which personified itself’ when he no longer had his ‘imagination under control’ (69). Lockwood, then, who does not believe in ghosts, ends the narrative by remarking how even more inconceivable than usual it is here, in this ­surpassingly peaceful churchyard, that the dead could have ‘unquiet slumbers’. When he says this, Lockwood speaks for the novel as a whole, because for this story to hold out the possibility of even a ghostly afterlife for Heathcliff and Catherine would betray its own sharpest rigour, blunting the affect it has been cultivating for so many pages. Remember what a ghost really is: a memory of the dead that continues to play on the nerves of the living. And the ghost that lingers longest is the one that has been bound to the body by the intensest bonds of enjoyment and suffering. If there is one thing we know from Heathcliff, it is that a ghost is not a form of ongoing life that can palliate the suffering of the mourner, it is the persistence of that suffering in its most distilled form. When Lockwood wonders ‘how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’, thus, the layered tonalities of his utterance in the echo-chamber of the novel are supremely lyrical and violently discordant and faintly farcical, because he is so far from the appropriate person to speak such lyrical sentiments in such moving language (which makes him, in modernist terms, precisely the only one who can), and because (again, in a very modernist way) there’s so much more in what he says than he knows. He means, ‘I, who don’t believe in ghosts, being a modern man – and also a good Christian – especially cannot imagine ghosts walking in this setting.’ But the novel says, ‘Nothing disturbs their slumbers, because ghosts don’t exist, at least not the kind that transcend death; and the reason they don’t exist is the same reason there is no transcendent life after death. Death is this, the return to the heath. There’s no disquiet here, because here there is only eternal death, and underneath the soil the rotting of their bodies. All that passion and suffering end in this; a tranquil, beautiful scene; yet on your nervous system, reader, I have tried to impress as much

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of the experience that creates ghosts – to stretch your nerves the way Catherine’s ghost stretches Heathcliff’s – as it is possible for a book to do.’ And, in the space between these two meanings, are evoked – ghosts, the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine, and perhaps (though no one has seen him yet, and after all he was not that attached to his body) of Edgar too. Evoked in a complex, savagely ironic way because the dull nervous system and fatuous sensibility of Lockwood has registered their story so inadequately, at his level of the telling, with so incomparably less feeling than even Nelly Dean – and, nevertheless, this entire tale is, indeed, registered for us on his perception, ghosts and all.

Notes   1. Sheila Smith in an essential essay on Wuthering Heights shows how much the specific form of erotic passion developed in this novel owes to the ballad tradition, and argues that this kind of passion is an authentically pagan remnant. ‘At Once Strong and Eerie: The Supernatural in Wuthering Heights and its Debt to the Ballad Tradition’, Review of English Studies, new series, 43.17: 498–517; citation from p. 514. Smith cites Lowry Wimberly as follows: ‘The remains of heathendom in British balladry are especially marked . . . the ideas and practices imbedded in British balladry may be referred almost wholly to a pagan culture.’ Wimberly, Folklore in the Scottish and English Ballads (New York and London: F. Ungar Publishing Co., 1928; repub. 1959), pp. 9–10.   2. I have throughout cited the Penguin edition of Wuthering Heights, edited by David Daiches (1985).   3. I will most often refer to Emily Brontë-scriptor as ‘EB’. I mean by this to indicate the highly distinctive relation to her text – call it ‘impersonality’, for lack of a better word – that I take this author to have, and my respect for this relation.   4. One of the most assiduous interpreters of the roles of Lockwood and Ellen Dean, for example, U. C. Knoepflmacher, pays little attention to the strictly formal role of the narrative apparatus, instead analysing the psychology of the narrators as characters, as participants in the story they transmit, even including among his considerations the entirely speculative thesis (inexplicably taken seriously by various critics) that Nelly might be Heathcliff’s illegitimate half-sister. U. C. Knoepflmacher, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Another commentator, Laura Hinton, makes some interesting remarks on how ‘Nelly controls the story’, but focuses primarily on how Nelly actually manipulated the events that she recounts. Laura Hinton, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 159–63.  5. Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 105. Eagleton’s argument about the Earnshaws as representatives of the old yeoman class, on which his larger

­172    Spirit Becomes Matter argument about the significance of Heathcliff depends, itself depends entirely on his unsubstantiated claim that they work the land.   6. The portrayal of the Earnshaws as gentry is, however, obscured by some apparent inconsistencies. Earnshaw’s sixty-mile walk each way to Liverpool on the trip that ends with his adoption of Heathcliff seems to imply lack of horses, and of means, as does his wife’s objection to the adoption because ‘they had their own bairns to feed’. As against these possible indications of want, however, when he announces to his family his trip to Liverpool, he says that he will buy the children whatever they choose, subject only to considerations of size, and implies that he walks by choice and not necessity: ‘You may choose what you like; only let it be little, for I shall walk there and back.’ Then, on his return, he vows that he will never attempt such a walk again, which implies, once again, that the walk was elective.   On any reading, as various critics have noticed, this part of the story, with its fairy tale overtones, seems anomalous. The English of the period were prodigious walkers, but the sixty-miles-each-way walk by an older man goes beyond the bounds of credibility; we may gauge the limits of what was physically possible from the fact that George Eliot’s Adam Bede, an extraordinary physical specimen at the peak of his powers, is said to be famous in his area for being able to make forty miles in a day. Perhaps, as Q. D. Leavis and others have suggested, this part of the novel belongs to a distinct, later abandoned stratum in its evolution. Everything apart from this brief moment in the text indicates that the Earnshaw family before Hindley’s breakdown is still in every way worthy of that ‘pride of name, and of his lineage’ to which Joseph remains devoted, and which he preserves in Hareton after Heathcliff’s usurpation (232).   7. Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel: Volume 1, To George Eliot (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1951), pp. 143–7.   8. The curiously hazy quality of Heathcliff’s age at the outset is another aspect of the anomalous, not-quite-realist nature of the origin story that Nelly tells. The fact that he is said to be ‘old enough to walk and talk’ implies that he is not far past this threshold, perhaps two years old; and the fact that he has been carried inside Earnshaw’s greatcoat for sixty miles suggests that he is even younger than that. Yet the fact that the waif’s face ‘looked older than Catherine’s’ (77), as well as the course of the rest of the story, implies that he is at least six at the time of his adoption. There is an ineliminable ambiguity here: a six-year-old is already well advanced in the socialisation process, while a two-year-old has barely begun. Brontë exploits both sides of the ambiguity, but the undeniable fact is that in the rest of the novel she depicts Heathcliff as having no memory of any other socialisation than what he acquires at the Heights.   9. The theory of ideological intoning is developed in V. I. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 10. That Heathcliff himself is keenly aware of the social significance of accent is shown by his encouraging Catherine Linton to ridicule Hareton for his ‘frightful Yorkshire pronunciation’ (254). Heathcliff and Hareton are near-doubles in their condition as servants, but Hareton, who is white and well-born, is clearly in the worse position as compared with Heathcliff at

The Return to the Heath ( Wuthering Heights)    173 the same age, who, although dark-skinned and low-born, had the cultural advantages of literacy and a good accent. 11. There is, by the way, no mystery about Heathcliff’s race to anyone in the book; he is recognised at first sight, by everyone, as a gypsy, and afterwards referred to accordingly. I have already mentioned that the discriminating Lockwood when they first meet describes him without qualification as ‘a dark-skinned gypsy’; so does Mrs Earnshaw when she first sees him, as well as, later, Mrs Linton and her daughter Isabella, who says ‘he looks exactly like the fortune-teller’s son’. Critics have conjured a mystery out of a remark by Mr Linton and one by Nelly, neither of which has any substance. After the sight test has already produced his wife’s and daughter’s identification of Heathcliff as a gypsy, Mr Linton speculates that he might be a ‘Lascar, or American castaway . . .’, basing this entirely transient speculation not on his looks but on the fact that, as he now recalls, Mr Earnshaw had found him on the streets of Liverpool; and Nelly’s remark that he might be an Indian prince or the son of the Chinese emperor is (obviously) purely fanciful, made with the intention of raising Heathcliff’s spirits. His apparent gypsy origin marks another point of contact between Wuthering Heights and the ballad tradition; Sheila Smith notes that ‘there are ballads of high-born women who desert their lords to follow their vagabond or gypsy loves’ (‘At Once Strong and Eerie’, pp. 506–7). 12. Knoepflmacher, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, unnumbered prefatory matter. 13. A rare dissenter from the standard view of the role of ‘nature’ in Wuthering Heights is John T. Matthews, who argues that ‘the lovers strictly observe the structuring codes of society’ and that ‘their instincts have been made highly conventional’. John T. Matthews, ‘Framing in Wuthering Heights’, in Wuthering Heights, ed. Patsy Stoneman (New York: St. Martin’s Press), pp. 54–73. Quotations from p. 61. 14. Nancy Armstrong, ‘Brontë In and Out of her Time’, in Wuthering Heights: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, 3rd edn, ed. William M. Sale, Jr and Richard J. Dunn, pp. 365–77. Armstrong’s remark manifests the continuing hold of the arrantly romantic reading of Heathcliff: ‘We are told that during a three year’s absence Heathcliff miraculously changed and then reappeared, still savage at heart, bearing all the outward and visible signs of a gentleman’ (374). 15. See Douglas R. Cubbison, ‘Eight Pence a Day: The Pay of the Private British Soldier during the War for American Independence’, (last accessed 21 October 2013). 16. The only money actually in evidence on his return is the money with which he starts gambling with Hindley the first night. Nelly says that he is ‘plentifully supplied’ for further gambling after the first night, but this need not imply any greater quantity of money than he might have accumulated in three years of effort and frugality as a soldier, and from Hindley himself in the first night’s gaming; the same goes for Catherine’s report that Heathcliff has told her he has offered ‘liberal payment’ for lodging at the Heights. The hypothesis that Heathcliff has no more than a modest nest egg would explain why he never makes any visible use of a pre-existing fortune; it also sorts well with the fact that on first seeing him again Nelly

­174    Spirit Becomes Matter immediately sizes up his appearance as that of a returned soldier. In any case, for Heathcliff’s money, in whatever amount, to signify the intrusion of the alien dynamism of capitalism into the agrarian world of the Heights and Grange, it should at least be the means by which Heathcliff gains his material ends after returning. But Heathcliff accomplishes these ends by gambling with Hindley, by forcing Linton’s daughter to marry his son, and by legal subterfuge – time-honoured novelistic plot devices – not by the use of any sort of pre-existing capital or ‘protocapital’. 17. If she meant to ask about the time before his return months earlier, it would be more natural for her to ask ‘How did he live? How did he get rich?’ and even to add time markers (‘. . . in the years that he was gone’). 18. As though to put the violence of the push Heathcliff gives to Edgar Linton’s chair in its proper perspective, EB has the second Catherine give a ‘violent’ push to the miserable Linton Heathcliff’s chair that causes him a ‘suffocating cough’ (272). The novel is astonishingly thorough in its repetition in the second half of motifs from the first, in a way that always sheds light on them. 19. We should recall, by the way, that country people are not as sentimental about dogs as city people. Isabella herself seems remarkably unbothered by the hanging of her dog, and the boy Hareton’s act of hanging puppies later in the novel is remarkable only for the manner of execution, not for the intended effect. Excess puppies must be killed, and where there is no external agency to relieve us of the task (and keep it out of our sight) I believe drowning has been the usual recourse. 20. He also throws a kitchen knife at Isabella, but misses. It should be noted that any intention of actually hitting her with the knife would contradict his consistent urge to self-preservation, as expressed in his concern for keeping ‘strictly within the limits of the law’ (188) in his treatment of her. 21. These incidents, thus, evoke the problematic of possession that runs through the novel. Heathcliff and Catherine’s first sight of Edgar and Isabella is of them fighting over a dog, and when Heathcliff narrates this incident to Nelly he tells her he could never dispute possession of anything with his Catherine. 22. Another repeated motif: this Catherine’s whip recalls the gift her mother wanted as a six-year-old, at the beginning of the tale. 23. Schematically: Let H1 be the figure or actant of youthful courtly lover instantiated by the young Heathcliff and later by Hareton, and H2 the Gothic figure instantiated by Hindley and subsequently by the older Heathcliff. Frontstage, the progression is from H1 to H2, while rear stage it goes from H2 to H1. 24. I leave aside the sticky problem that Heathcliff has no right of inheritance to the Heights – a problem in which the novel itself appears to have no interest. 25. This, at least, is the testimony of the literary tradition. Bruce Robbins places Nelly’s ‘aggression and triumph’ in relation to Catherine’s death in the context of a long literary tradition in which servants characteristically manifest such sentiments at the deaths of their masters. Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 98. 26. His mistreatment of Isabella during their marriage is harsh, but hardly

The Return to the Heath ( Wuthering Heights)    175 inhuman; it consists mainly of verbal abuse and of the very restricted situation within which he forces her to live. 27. Nelly does later, rather perfunctorily, claim to feel something for Linton (246). Given her lack of response to his cries when she originally abandons him, the claim does not have much force. 28. See Edward Chitham on the general elision of Chapters 18–33 of Wuthering Heights in his valuable book, The Birth of Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë at Work (London: Macmillan Press, 1998), pp. 182–6. 29. Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel, p. 140. 30. Heathcliff himself, however, is almost as susceptible to such torments as his son, with respect to his mourning for Catherine. No passage shows EB’s systematic sense of the physio-psychology of sadism better than the following remarks by Isabella, which also show that there is nothing unique about Heathcliff’s brand of cruelty. In these remarks, Isabella begins her account of how she had at last managed to acquire the upper hand in her contest of pain-infliction with Heathcliff by ridiculing his mourning for Catherine (216–17): . . . I had succeeded in rousing his rage a pitch above his malignity. Pulling out the nerves with red hot pincers requires more coolness than knocking on the head. He was worked up to forget the fiendish prudence he boasted of, and proceeded to murderous violence. I experienced pleasure in being able to exasperate him: the sense of pleasure woke my instinct of self-preservation . . . (209) 31. These remarks of Heathcliff’s are prefigured in the often quoted words of Heathcliff to Nelly in Chapter 14: ‘I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething; and I grind with greater energy, in proportion to the increase of pain’ (189). At that point, however, Heathcliff’s vengefulness is still directed at his real antagonists – Hindley, Edgar and Isabella – and there is a stark contrast between the Gothic violence of yearning to crush their entrails (glossed with the fascinating, enigmatic notion of a ‘moral teething’) and the cold sadism of Heathcliff’s ‘treating himself’ to a slow vivisection. 32. See Birger Pearson, The Pneumatikos-Psychikos Terminology in I Corinthians (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1973), and Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan, Chapter Three, ‘How the Spirit (Almost) Became Flesh’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 33. Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, ed. R. W. N. Hoare and J. K. Riches, trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971), p. 43. 34. On the full resonance of these words in Milton’s poem, see Chapter 6, ‘Adam’s Choice’, in Eros in Mourning. 35. Plato, Phaedo, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997). 36. Note the characteristic spin that Nelly puts on the scene. Catherine has defied Heathcliff many times, and his response has always been to hit her; but Nelly presents him as on the verge of ghoulish murder. 37. There are other figures of interminable mourning for a lost love, like

­176    Spirit Becomes Matter Dickens’s Miss Havisham and Faulkner’s Miss Emily, but their mourning has been transformed into melancholia. Heathcliff’s is still authentic mourning. 38. There are, of course, animals that mourn; but we do not think of them as being less like humans for that. 39. ‘Will you forget me – will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, “That’s the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I’ve loved many others since, [etc.]”’ (195). Cf. Paradise Lost, 9.826–30: ‘. . . What if God have seen / And death ensue? Then I shall be no more, / and Adam wedded to another Eve, / shall live with her enjoying, I extinct; / A death to think.’ John Milton, Complete Poems and Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1957). 40. ‘The parergon inscribes something which comes as an extra, exterior to the proper field . . . but whose transcendent exteriority comes to play, abut onto, brush against, rub, press against the limit itself and intervene in the inside.’ Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McCloud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 56.

Chapter 5

Spirit Becomes Matter

In The Professor, Jane Eyre and Middlemarch the moral neutrality or objectivity of the modernist gaze at life is beginning to develop. In these books we breathe a moral atmosphere a world away from that of, say, Vanity Fair, and even quite different from that of such a much less obtrusively moralistic writer (in most of her novels) as Jane Austen. This new moral atmosphere is what Heather Glen notices about Jane Eyre when she remarks that The power that Jane [Eyre] most covets is not that of moral influence; and her trajectory is not exactly presented as a process of moral growth. When as a young woman she finds that her Reed cousins have lost their erstwhile power to oppress her, the reason she gives has little to do with the maturity she has acquired: ‘within the last few months feelings had been stirred in me so much more potent than any they could raise . . . that their airs gave me no concern either for good or bad’ (229). Contemplating Blanche Ingram, she feels a peculiar, hectic ‘agitation’, as she is drawn into an excited sense of how her rival’s romantic campaign might more successfully be pursued.1

Glen goes through the whole novel, giving further examples of the pragmatic cast of Jane’s motivations, motivations that exist on a parallel plane with her moral and religious ideas, but develop according to their own internal dynamics: ‘Reunited with [Rochester] at Ferndean, she shows considerably more interest in provoking his sexual jealousy than in ensuring that he is reformed’ (97). Glen does not refer this character of the novel to the influence of physio-psychology, but what she describes is precisely the phenomenon that I have tried to explain. In France, the scientific observation of the passions had begun to emerge much earlier than it did in England. Already in the seventeenth century works like the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld (whom Nietzsche valued) and La Princesse de Clèves of Madame de Lafayette were moving toward a trans-moral moral psychology. The argument of this book is that English literature of this period deserves more credit for

­178    Spirit Becomes Matter development in this direction than it has been given – that, considered as moral psychology, it is on a level with the contemporary work of Flaubert and Baudelaire. In this book I have stressed the Christian roots of the moral ideology that is being chipped away at by the new naturalism in morals, but, as the French examples suggest, there has always been a powerful naturalistic element in the Christian tradition of moral philosophy. The Christian tradition always recognised the power of the drives to determine action, and described in detail the elaborate ruses by which, under the influence of the drives, consciousness deceives itself as to the virtue of its choices. But the analysis of this process was based on the presupposition that the drives of post-lapsarian human beings tend to pull human beings down to moral corruption, and its object was to learn to identify the influence that the drives have on our moral choices, in order to reduce this influence. This presupposition and this aim imposed prior limitations on the power of moral philosophy to illuminate the system of the psyche. With the development of a scientific psychology in the nineteenth century, the aim of literary moral psychology gradually shifted to the fullest possible objective description of subjectivities, independently of how their motivational systems might be morally evaluated; the hypothesis I have developed here is that it is specifically by means of the energy paradigm that the psychic toxin Nietzsche calls ‘moraline’ could at last begin to be rigorously eliminated from moral psychology.2 Of course the new, non-moral discipline of moral psychology is still, in the hands of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, intricately intertwined with moral, and sometimes religious, concepts and judgements, and separating the threads of the new discourse from those of the old requires the closest attention, as well as a theory on which to base the separation. I have tried to do this in a way that will be convincing to a reader of any intellectual persuasion; but it will have been evident throughout that I write from the standpoint of a certain, very specific intellectual tradition, the sceptical, naturalistic tradition that flows unevenly from the Greeks to the Enlightenment, and then receives its decisive articulations in the later nineteenth century from Baudelaire and Nietzsche. In the twentieth century I identify this inheritance primarily with a certain thread in modernist literature – with Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Camus and Beckett, for example.3 The works and passages by Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot on which I have focused, and which I have valued most highly, are those in which they move writing in the direction of this naturalistic tradition, for which the idea of transcendence is no longer a lure – for which the great, ineluctable, intellectual task is to come to terms with this life here, as what there is

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and all that there is, a task that intrinsically involves the naturalisation of moral values. At the limit of such a thinking through, in the literary tradition, lies the enigma of sex and of the death and decay of the body – an enigma that, without the palliating hope of transcendence, must now be posed in its starkest form. Emily Brontë mobilises all her art to throw it against this question; hence the order of exposition of this book, in which the earliest written work is addressed last. What I am referring to as Christianity is, of course, only one strand of a polymorphous historical religion. A hugely important strand, yes, but far from the only one. It might be argued that Christianity is whatever anyone practises or believes that is based somehow in the Gospels (including the Dead Sea Scrolls, I suppose). There have certainly been many forms of Christianity, from Ranters to Mormons to atheist Christians, and some of them do not adhere to one or more of the doctrines I ascribe to ‘orthodox’ or ‘symbolic’ Christianity. This broader conception of Christianity is the one held by the critics that in Chapter 2 I called ‘liberal Christians’, on the basis of which they argue that Jane Eyre is in fact a faithful Christian, though perhaps one who believes in a ‘way of eros’ equal to the ‘way of agape’, or in a feminine deity. Since all the biographical evidence supports the idea that Charlotte Brontë herself was a passionate believer, in her own perhaps revisionary way, there is much to be said for this view. For the argument of this book, however, it is of secondary importance whether we think of these novels as involving a critique of Christianity that, at least fitfully, adopts a standpoint from outside Christianity (the standpoint of this book) or, alternatively, as a self-criticism made from within a historically evolving Christianity. I have identified Christianity with its classical, Pauline-Augustinian forms, as a religion that values the next life above this, prescribes the strict subordination of the love of mortal beings to the love of God, inculcates guilt with respect to drive and desire, and, above all, recoils from the idea that the soul dies with the body. But I do not claim that this is ‘Christianity’ tout court. Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot no doubt belong somewhere on the spectrum of revisionist Christianities. So too, doubtless, does Emily Brontë; though hers was a mind of an order that I would not pretend to categorise. Even Nietzsche might be classified as a revisionist Christian. He says in the Genealogy that the instinct of truth that leads him to question Christianity was bred in him by Christianity itself; and in his madness he took to signing himself ‘The Crucified’. But such questions of classification do not affect the substance of my investigation, which is primarily concerned with the detail-work that each of these writers accomplished. They are all contributors to an intellectual project that

­180    Spirit Becomes Matter has not yet been completed; my question is, ‘Christian’ or not, how far does each of them carry the naturalistic gaze into the moral psyche?4 Whatever the ultimate moral, religious or metaphysical allegiances involved in the case of each of them, to the degree that these thinkers accepted the fundamental physio-psychological picture of the human psyche, they became, at their best, like the physiologists themselves, empirical investigators who observed causes and effects in a way that was unaffected by these allegiances. As the research of the physiologists expanded its reach it became capable of explaining aspects of the functioning of the human mind that had been thought out of the reach of scientific explanation, and the researcher’s profession of faith – whether it was a faith in a supernatural soul with a supernatural destiny, or in the existence of a transcendent law of morality – could be entirely disengaged from the gears of the machinery of explanation of the phenomena in question. Alan Richardson cites the striking example of Charles Bell, an important physiologist who contributed toward the development of a brain-based psychology without appearing to slight the soul, constructed telling adaptationist arguments as proofs of God’s design rather than result of a blind natural process, and portrayed the mind, brain, and body as a single system without courting charges of materialism. ‘They would have it that I am in search of the seat of the soul,’ he complained of some of the ‘friends’ who attended his lectures; ‘I wish only to investigate the structure of the brain, as we examine the structure of the eye and ear.’5

When, on the other hand, investigators of either the scientific or the ­literary type dropped this kind of neutrality, they stopped making discoveries of the kind in question here. This is what happened to George Eliot with Daniel Deronda, a character who is designed to satisfy the highest requirements of Eliot’s ideology of altruism, and in consequence offers not one surprising insight for the student of moral psychology. In my reading of Middlemarch, I brought centre stage those aspects of Eliot’s work that show her naturalism at its most acute, a naturalism that was attentive, in Lewes-influenced fashion, to the dialectic between physio-psychology and the social outside. But in Daniel Deronda – her next, and final, novel – Eliot turned her back on the naturalistic avenue of inquiry in order to develop to the full a fantasy of profound ethical being as by nature, by some intrinsic quality or power, driven to ascetic ethical striving, thus as aiming at the Good in defiance of all external circumstance. This posited intrinsic quality takes the form of a sort of intuitive Jewishness on the part of the protagonist, who, although Jewish by birth, is reared in the most un-Jewish way possible by his adoptive, non-Jewish parents. And in order to make

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him perfectly free of ‘cultural construction’ of his ascetic will to power, Eliot imagines Daniel Deronda as the most ascetic of all her protagonists – more perfectly ascetic even than Savonarola, because free from the classical aspiration to glory.6 Savonarola and Dorothea Brooke are also ascetics, but Eliot had been alive to the self-assertion that operated in them through ascetic channels. Deronda is as purely self-sacrificing as it is possible to be and still remain a viable protagonist of a novel.

The Doctrine of Forgiveness in a Naturalistic Light In order to illustrate as precisely as possible the transition from the idealising discourse of the morality system to the new, physio-psychological interpretation, I will take up once again the case of St John’s purported forgiveness of Jane Eyre. The critical representation of his bad faith in this case is made by Charlotte Brontë from the standpoint of Christianity’s own ideal concept of forgiveness; the ideal itself is presupposed to be valid, and St John is criticised on the basis of the norm set by the ideal. But serious Christian thinkers have always known that it is a Godlike ideal, difficult or impossible for human beings to achieve in its purity. The doctrine is ideal, precisely, to motivate human beings to aspire to a higher standard of being than is actually within their reach. Hence the fact that this or that human being fails to live up to it is no objection to the doctrine itself; on the contrary, it merely points up its sublime nature. The Jewish thinker Vladimir Jankélévitch comments on this aspect of forgiveness in a way that is perfectly in harmony with Christian teaching: Even if no one since the world has been the world has ever forgiven without reservations, without afterthoughts, without mental restrictions, or without an infinitesimal amount of ressentiment, it suffices that the possibility of pure forgiveness is conceivable; if it has never been attained in fact, the limit of pure forgiveness would still designate our duty for us, would determine and orient our efforts, would furnish a criterion for permitting us to distinguish the pure and the impure, and would give a standard of measure to evaluation and a direction to charity. The one who never attains the ideal (the ideal being made precisely for never being attained) can get infinitely nearer to it.7

And to underline this ideal nature, Jankélévitch compares it to that of Plato’s intelligible essences. St John falls very far indeed from this ideal in his treatment of Jane; but his belief in Christ is absolute, and he has sacrificed all ordinary worldly pursuits to the preaching of the Gospel. According to what I have called Christianity’s Axiom of Purity, his faults do not disqualify

­182    Spirit Becomes Matter him from being a ‘saint’. Thus Jane’s criticism of his hypocrisy in pretending to forgive her may be understood as pure intra-Christian critique – a reminder of how fallible even the best of human creatures is, and how infinitely distant is the goal of true Christliness. But this is not how Jane herself conceptualises the matter. Jane does not criticise St John in order to point up the lesson drawn by Jankélévitch, but as part of the labour of throwing off St John’s influence, of resisting his attempt to appropriate her.8 She labels St John’s covert vengefulness with the language of Christianity: this is the ‘corrupt’ man acting. But she has no vital interest in the notion of corruption, either as theology or in any way that would colour her judgement with ‘moraline’. She has a curiously detached relation to the religio-moral character of St John’s behaviour; her conclusions about him are not a judgement but, as she herself calls it, an ‘analysis’ of his nature, and this analysis is made with an eye to how his manner of being affects her, what it would do to her if she were married to him. Afterwards, she accepts him for what she now knows him to be, even admires him for it. But she feels no claim at all made on her own moral-spiritual being by the distinction between saintliness and corruption that she applies to St John. For the authentically Christian perspective, to believe in this distinction is to believe that it applies to oneself – to believe that I, too, am obligated to strive for saintliness, and to recoil with loathing from the ‘corrupt man’ in myself, even as I forgive it in my neighbour. But Jane holds this entire system of judgement at arm’s length from her own case. Her moral being is organised according to different, more pragmatic-hedonic principles than is St John’s, and she shapes her own Christianity according to the requirements of these principles, rejecting those of its doctrines that would be an obstacle to her pragmatic-hedonic pursuits. St John she sees as simply a different sort of being from herself; she has no personal interest whatsoever in saintliness. There are thus two kinds of critical analysis of the psychology of forgiveness that look very much alike but have radically different trajectories, with radically different ends in view. Both kinds posit a gap between the ideal concept of forgiveness and the ‘reservations, afterthoughts, ressentiment’ that shadow it in empirical consciousness. But the religious thinker, whether Christian or Jew, sees in this gap occasion to sharpen to the utmost the concept of the purity and ideality of the ideal, and feels in this sharpening a challenge to come as close to the ideal of perfection as possible, while continuing to mourn the shortcomings of the mortal being who cannot quite get there. From the perspective of critical moral psychology, by contrast, the attainment of a physio-psychologically ‘clean’ forgiveness – one that is not a covert

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form of vengeance, or an expression of a masochistic inability to assert one’s own selfhood, or the like – is of crucial importance; but it is not a goal that is infinitely above and beyond us. It is attainable, if the subject involved is what Nietzsche calls a ‘well-constituted’ human being; and it involves knowing how to express one’s aggressivity when necessary, sometimes in such a way as to retaliate for a wrong one has suffered. Forgiveness belongs to a ‘total economy’ of physio-psychological energies that does not absolutely exclude vengeance; this is what Jane’s early notion of ethical, pedagogic vengeance recognises. Forgiveness conceived within such an overall economy is not an ideal but a pragmatic norm. Nietzsche himself in his darker moods seems to doubt that there exist, or have ever existed, many ‘well-constituted’ humans, but if we do not elevate the notion of the well-constituted person into a new kind of unattainable ideal (as Nietzsche tended to do), we might judge Jane Eyre to be a reasonably well-constituted human, and Will Ladislaw, and even Lydgate, as well. The last is egoistic, and has some social and political attitudes that we might think deplorable, but, by any earthly standard, physio-psychologically he rates high. Dorothea Brooke’s psychic economy has been twisted enough by the influence of ascetic morality that she has to go the long way round to reach an internal balance, but she is well to this side of St John, and might be numbered among the ‘well-enough’ constituted (to adapt a phrase of D. W. Winnicott’s). As Plato and Aristotle already knew and said, being well constituted depends mostly on being well brought up. If one has been too badly marred by one’s upbringing, there is little chance of one’s being able to work through the aporias of the ideal demand for forgiveness; and if one has been well brought up, one should be able to forgive cleanly without making excessive to-do about it. St John, evidently, is not one of the sufficiently well-constituted. From the naturalistic standpoint, that, and not the shortcomings of mere mortality in relation to a divine ideal, is the problem with St John. Emily and Charlotte Brontë were pioneers in the depiction of childhood experience and its effects on the adult, and within the field of this experience they focused on the naturalistic, biologistic turn of moral psychology – a turn based on the fundamental recognition that flows of physio-psychological energy are in themselves ‘beyond good and evil’, like a flow of water or of electricity. The religio-moral judgement on drives and desires after the Fall is that, though created pure, they are intrinsically tilted toward defilement, by nature so readily drawn toward moral corruption that only the most anxious self-surveillance, and the grace of God, can keep them on the strait path. This is the toxin in our ethical judgement that Nietzsche calls ‘moraline’. Augustine in the

­184    Spirit Becomes Matter Confessions, accordingly, stigmatises every movement of consciousness, no matter how momentary, that is drawn toward an earthly object as an expression of ‘fornication against God’ (I:13). And then there are all the occasions when I am sitting at home and my attention is attracted by a lizard catching flies or by a spider entangling them in his web. The animals may be small, but this does not make the thing any different. I go on from them to praise you, wondrous Creator and Director of all things; but it was not this that first drew my attention. It is one thing to get up quickly and another thing not to fall down. (X:35)9

This is a very stringent application of Paul’s rule of the subordination of earthly loves; but it is generated by the same logic of ideally saintly spirit that produces the pure concept of forgiveness. This logic of saintliness is subtly, gradually, withdrawn by Victorian physio-psychological thinking as it comes to understand human motivations in a systematically naturalistic way. The belief in a transcendent agency, for which the primary significance of physio-psychological energy is its intrinsic tendency toward corruption, little by little loses its authority over the inquiry into moral psychology. The interest shifts from the way the twists in moral psychology are related to an ideal standard, to the way in which they are related to the total economy of naturalistic forces, physiological, psychological and socio-political, within which they work themselves out.

Spirit, Energy, Matter The new physio-psychology was widely perceived as materialist in nature and as tending toward atheism, but this view was not universally held. In the Victorian period some interpreters understood energy as a strictly physical phenomenon, with no depth dimension; but the tradition of German Romanticism – including, in his own way, Nietzsche – saw it as a physical phenomenon with a ‘vital’ inward nature of some sort; and still others saw it as an expression of an underlying divine power that was in no way contradicted by the physicalist manner in which it could be understood. Thus, as Rick Rylance points out, Robert Chambers in his vastly influential Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation could say that ‘the mind-body circuit runs on electricity’ but then add that ‘electricity is almost as metaphysical as ever the mind was supposed to be’. Thus, ‘mental action may be imponderable, intangible, and yet a real existence, and ruled by the Eternal through his laws’.10 Energy is not dense and heavy; it is, like light, that most insubstantial

Spirit Becomes Matter    185

and divine of natural phenomena, supremely light and mobile. Energy thus offered hope to those who could not reject the findings of science, but who feared the ultimate implications for their worldview of these findings, and wished to find a way to reaffirm their old beliefs within the new framework. Hegel in his incomparable way had summed up the metaphysical logic of the spirit-body antithesis that in the Victorian period produces the metaphysical interpretation of energy: The freedom of the will is best explained by a reference to the physical world. Freedom . . . is just as fundamental a character of the will as weight is of bodies. If we say: matter is ‘heavy’, we might mean that this predicate is only contingent, but it is nothing of the kind, for nothing in matter is without weight. Matter is rather weight itself. Heaviness constitutes the body and is the body [italics added]. The same is the case with freedom and the will, since the free entity is the will . . .   Spirit is in the first instance intelligence, and . . . produces itself as will, which . . . is the most direct truth of intelligence.11

Spirit-mind is as such divine and faultless, light and free; guilt is crystallised doctrinally in Christianity as a disaster that befalls spirit because of Adam’s sin. Guilt is the falling-away-from-itself of spirit: spirit, insofar as guilty, has ceased to be spirit because guilt ‘thickens’ its light, aethereal substance, making it darker and heavier, or nailing it to the gross substance of the body (this is how ghosts are produced). This conception of spirit, adumbrated in Plato’s Phaedo and Phaedrus, was given its most consummate expression in Dante’s Divine Comedy.12 At the limit, guilt would transform spirit into body and nothing but body. Aery, light-filled spirit is pure motility, pure self-moving spontaneity; matter, by contrast, gross physicality, is inert in itself, moving only in response to the action of forces that impinge on it from outside. Energy was, thus, in the nineteenth century, as it still is today, a phenomenon that lends itself to metaphysical speculation and to what, from a strictly naturalist standpoint, looks like mystification. One can believe that will, thought and emotion are movements of energy in the brain and nervous system, movements the laws of which are fully capable of being understood and described, with no executive spiritual agent, no metaphysical ‘I’, set over and above these movements – and still believe that energy in its inmost nature is a manifestation of a transcendent principle of vitality, or even of divinity. That is why this book is not titled ‘Spirit Becomes Energy’. Its title reflects the fact that this is not a history of physio-psychology but an interested, polemical account of a probable contribution of physio-psychological thought to the naturalisation of morals, a naturalisation that requires the closing of all back doors to transcendence. Matter, principle of solidity, opacity and weight, is the

­186    Spirit Becomes Matter dark twin of energy, limitlessly resistant, unlike energy, to sublimation into spirit. From the standpoint of spirit, matter is the corpse of nature, bits of which might be animated now and then, but which relentlessly relapse into the corpse-state from which they emerge. Physio-psychology was not in fact ‘materialist’ in the old associationist sense of materialism; it was a ‘materialism’ of energetic systems, not of colliding atoms. But its many detractors who accused it of materialism had a more accurate sense of the fundamental world-historical meaning of the physiopsychology of mind than did those of its defenders who tried to make it compatible with religious metaphysics. To keep energy from flying into the transcendent, a rigorous naturalism must pin it ineluctably to matter – in order finally to bring it back, as Emily Brontë did, to the question of the corpse-that-will-not-rise-again, which in literature is always also the question of erotic love.

Notes  1. Heather Glen, Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 97.   2. If one finds it hard to believe that such a simple physicalist idea could have opened the way to the immensely subtle moral-psychological investigations of the great novelists I have treated, it might help to recall that a couple of decades later Sigmund Freud began his own radical new form of soulscience from essentially the same fund of concepts: the early Project for a Scientific Psychology, for example, with its theory of pathways of receptors in which channels could be ‘frayed’ by repeated passages of energy; or the notion of quantities of libido that must find expression by one means or another.   3. Joyce holds a special place in this sequence, as I explain in ‘The Decomposing Form of Joyce’s Ulysses’, in Derek Attridge (ed.), James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Casebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). I discuss the relation of Derrida to this tradition in an essay, ‘Derrida, Dennett, and the Ethico-Political Project of Naturalism’, in Derrida Today 1.1 (2008): 19–41.   4. Rick Rylance, for his part, concludes that ‘Whatever headway was made by the new physiologically oriented psychology during the nineteenth century was made against a Christian conception of humanity that stressed exclusive spiritual determinations, and the special status of humans judged in relation to animals.’ Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 24.   5. Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 30–1.  6. Interestingly, however, there is another ascetic in Daniel Deronda who would have formed a fascinating study for the kind of attention that Eliot had given to her earlier characters, but of which Eliot is apparently no

Spirit Becomes Matter    187 longer capable: Ezra Cohen. Ezra’s deepest desire is to appropriate Deronda wholly, without residue, as the vehicle by which his own project of worldshaping might be carried forward – a desire that he, in fact, accomplishes. From the standpoint of critical moral psychology, Deronda’s entire willingness to be subsumed by Ezra is a grisly phenomenon. Because the appropriator, Ezra, has submitted his own will to the moral law, however, Eliot sees nothing problematic (and therefore fruitful for analysis) about this kind of subsumption. This is the same terminus of moral vision that lies on the horizon of Dorothea Brooke’s yearning to have the moral law rule her ‘errant will’.  7. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 116.  8. Cf. the Ezra-Daniel relation in Daniel Deronda. Eliot perceives nothing but saintly egolessness in both Ezra and Daniel, and in this way smooths all physio-psychological dubiousness out of the former’s appropriation of the latter. On this point, however, cf. Suzy Anger, Victorian Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 124–7.  9. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Rex Warner (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 247. 10. Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, p. 35. 11. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, para 4 (‘Addition’). I have mingled the translations of T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942) and S. W. Dyde (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996; orig. pub. 1896). 12. On spirit as light in Dante, see Joseph Mazzeo, Structure and Thought in the Paradiso (Binghamton, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958).

Index

aggressivity, 94, 100, 140–1, 151–2, 154, 156, 167, 183 Anger, Kathy, 19, 29n, 128n, 187n Aristotle, 183 Armstrong, Nancy, 138, 173n ascetic morality, 14, 16, 84, 117, 183 ascetic priest, 14–15, 17, 36, 53, 108 ascetic will, 12, 15–16, 21, 27n, 53–4, 73n, 96–8, 104, 108, 110n, 118– 19, 181 Augustine, St, 15, 18, 183 Axiom of Purity, 39–40, 49, 54, 181 Bain, Alexander, 5–6, 25n, 26n Baudelaire, 132, 161, 178 Beaty, Jerome, 32, 56, 64–5, 69n, 131n Beckett, J. V., 124–5 Blake, Kathleen, 26n Brontë, Charlotte, 1–3, 5, 9, 10, 12–15, 32–4, 38–40, 43–6, 48, 52–6, 58–9, 62–3, 65, 94, 178, 179, 181, 183 Jane Eyre, 1–2, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 16, 31–75, 94, 97, 98, 103, 108, 162, 177, 179, 182–3 The Professor, 3, 9–13, 44, 45, 177 Villette, 5 Brontë, Emily, 21–4, 132–3, 136, 138, 141, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153–8, 161, 163, 164, 165 Wuthering Heights, 1, 2, 3, 7, 21–3, 30n, 68, 73n, 132–75, 176 Bunyan, John, 31 Byron, George Gordon, 2 Calvinist, Calvinistic, 36, 49, 55–6 capitalism, 23, 174n

Chambers, Robert, 184 Christian doctrine, 31, 36–40, 49, 54, 58, 62, 66, 73n, 160 Christianity, 3, 13–16, 28n, 31–3, 35–9, 49–56, 68, 69n, 70n, 73n, 74n, 76, 110n, 160–1, 179, 181–2, 185 class, 3, 5, 20–1, 23, 113–28, 134–8, 147, 151–3 class ideology, 21, 114, 119, 121, 122 Coleridge, 24n conservation of energy, principle of, 7, 110n Cottom, Daniel, 20, 79, 112, 116 courtly love, 88, 145, 151, 156, 157, 165 Dale, Peter Alan, 31, 32, 64–6, 69n, 75n Dante, 185 Darwin, Charles, 2, 7, 30n, 110n Darwin, Erasmus, 4, 24n, 25n David, Deirdre, 20, 112, 116 Davis, Michael, 29n Desmond, Adrian, 2, 4–5 Eagleton, Terry, 20, 135, 171n Egoism, 19, 77–80, 90–7, 106 Eliot, George, 3, 7, 8, 16–21, 76–131, 178, 179, 180–1 Adam Bede, 172n Daniel Deronda, 16, 19, 21, 98, 102, 113, 180–1, 186n, 187n Middlemarch, 3, 7, 16, 19, 20–1, 76–131, 135, 177, 180 Romola, 17–20, 102 The Mill on the Floss, 79 energy dynamics, 7, 26n, 110n

Index    189 energy paradigm, 4–6, 110n, 178 estate economics, 135 estate modernisation, 123–36

moraline, 178, 182–3 mourning, 132–3, 164–5 Myers, Frederic, 16

forgiveness, 33–54, 62, 69n, 70n, 72n, 181–4 Franklin, Jeffrey, 31–2

naturalism, naturalistic, 2–9, 22, 24, 26n, 30n, 54, 76, 107–8, 169, 178–80, 186 nerve energy, 6, 25n, 29n, 157 Nietzsche, 3, 5–12, 14–15, 16, 17, 23, 25n, 26n, 33, 35–6, 53, 63, 132, 178, 179, 183, 184 Ecce Homo, 25n, 36 On the Genealogy of Morals, 7, 13, 14, 26n, 28n, 179 The Gay Science, 6, 63 Twilight of the Idols, 16

Gallagher, Catherine, 20, 111, 116–18, 129n Gift, 33–4, 40, 41–9, 63, 94–5 Glen, Heather, 13–14, 28n, 177 Haley, Bruce, 4, 5 hedonic economy of ascetic will, 98 hedonism, 20–1, 114, 119, 182 Hegel, 185 Hilton, Boyd, 7 Humanism, 116 Huxley, T. H., 4 hydraulic model, 7 ideological intoning, 13, 136 Iliad, 132, 164 Jankelevitch, 34, 43, 45, 69n, 181–2 Kafka, Metamorphosis, 168–9 Kant, Immanuel, 16, 28n, 52, 54 Kettle, Arnold, 136, 156 Kucich, John, 20, 27n, 112 Levine, George, 7, 19, 128n Lewes, W. H., 5, 7, 17, 19, 176 materialist critique of Middlemarch, 112–13 materialist dimension of Middlemarch, 116–17, 119–28 materialist explanation of mind, 2–7, 161, 180, 184–6 modernism and Wuthering Heights, 167–70 Moore, Gregory, 5, 6 moral ideology, 4, 11, 13, 18–19, 34, 39, 46–8, 51, 58, 62, 80, 87, 90, 93, 95, 97, 105, 109, 132, 149, 178 moral psychology, 3, 8, 9, 11, 14, 19, 33, 39, 43, 46, 52, 62, 63, 77, 107, 154, 177–8, 180, 182–3, 184 moral psychology, critical, 3, 11, 14, 42, 46, 182, 187n

phrenology, 5 physio-psychology, 1–7, 9, 19, 94, 157–8, 177, 184, 186 Plato, 162, 183, 185 race, 23, 137, 173n Richardson, Alan, 4, 180 Rylance, Rick, 3, 6, 184, 186n sadism, 12, 19, 44, 52, 91, 101, 133, 141, 143, 152, 155, 156–8, 175n St Hilaire, Geoffroy, 4, 5 St Paul, 31, 32, 37, 160, 184 self-developing energies, 4 Semmel, Bernard, 17, 127 Shuttleworth, Sally, 6, 7, 10, 12, 27n, 76, 110n social outside, in Middlemarch, 20, 33n, 79–80, 84, 99, 109, 112, 120, 180 Spencer, Herbert, 2, 5–6, 7, 8, 12 Sympathy, 19, 27n, 28n, 29n, 63, 77–8, 80, 84, 90–7, 102–4, 106, 108–9, 110n, 112 Tytler, Jamie, 1 vengeance, 33–5, 40–2, 49, 53, 62, 94, 97, 133, 156, 159, 162–3, 182–3 will to power, 5, 6, 8–12, 14, 16, 18–20, 21, 25n, 26n, 27n, 39–40, 46–7, 50, 53–4, 64, 78, 81, 84, 96–9, 101–2, 106, 108–9, 118, 120, 181 Williams, Raymond, 20, 115–16, 129n