Shuttleworth 1984

Sally Shuttleworth. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science. Cambridge UP, 1984.

Preface

• ix Although all novelists in the c19 were inevitably affected by the close interdependence of social and scientific thought, GE was, in this respect, remarkable. She brought to her writing a breadth of knowledge of contemporary social and scientific theory unmatched by any of her peers. Scientific ideas did not merely filter through her novels into the metaphors and images of her work; in constructing her novels she engaged in an active dialogue with contemporary scientific though. My aim in this work is to trace the diverse and complex ways in which her involvement with science influences the development of her fiction.
• x organic theory, from which GE’s fiction “draw[s] their moral framework”: "The Victorian theorists who stressed the dynamic interdependence of whole and part were adhering...to premises that were first articulated in both social and physiological thought only at the end of the c18."
  • repl atomistic social ideas of the c18 with images of organic interdependence
  • cross ref with Dames 2007
  • is there an elision btwn the conceptual model and the ethical model there? Should be drawn out. I worry about the teleology of authorial development in her rhetorical model too

Ch 8 Daniel Deronda Fragmentation and Organic Union

• 175 ["make believe of a beginning"] By suggesting that the novelist’s choice of a beginning is merely a fictional construct, GE challenges the dominant assumptions of the realist text. She takes direct responsibility in DD for her own constructive role as novelist.
• GE's goal in DD is no to represent a fixed "reality" but to challenge contemporary social values and conceptions. The novel presents a bitter critique of the economic and social practices of English society, and of the restrictions which it imposed on social and psychological understanding. To express this social vision, GE turns not to the empiricism of natural history, but to a more radical theory of scientific method, and a more dynamic narrative structure.
• The text of DD does not adhere to the conventions of spatial or temporal continuity.
• 176 Science, like poetry, cannot provide absolute surety; all findings are dependent on the constructive role of the scientist...[177] Experimenters...never assume an immutable starting point; their more open attitude, therefore, enables them to accept contradiction.
• 177 GE also rejects linear causality. Full authoritative knowledge, she argues in the epigraph ["Even Science..."], cannot be obtained by tracing through a linear sequence of cause and effect. Through the figure of Mordecai she criticizes those forms of social thought which cannot accomodate relativity or contradiction
• It is impossible to divorce GE's methodological reflections in DD from the narrative form of the novel or its social themes.
• tracking images of astronomy and the relationship to a closed Ptolemaic universe vs an open Copernican one
• 179 Thus Lewes argued in The Foundations of a Creed that "Fictions are potent; and all are welcome if they can justify themselves by bringing speculative insight within the range of positive vision." As a methodological statement it defines GE's practice in DD.
• 180 [Separateness and communication, part and whole] The organic ideal that underlies the novel - the balance of individuality and social integration - also determines the representation of Mordecai's idealism.
• 181 GE deliberately breaks the conventions of realism to include within the novel coincidences in plot that strain credibility, and individual visions that narrative events fulfil... The sequence of the narrative seems to suggest that there exist forms of mental and social association, and patterns of events, that normal social judgement excludes or denies. GE uses the analogy with science to validate this judgement.
• GE is not arguing, in DD, that reason should be abandoned for a vague, implausible, mystical faith, but that appearances should not be accepted unchallenged. Man must remain open to hitherto unexplored alternatives, to different forms of thought.
• 182 In DD she questions both the functions of language, and her own role as author. [ex of the wonderful passage about love as an inadequate "word of all work" on 253] GE here implicitly rejects all modes of thought which presume that life can be known and strictly defined or quantified. [i.e., not a narrow empiricism]
• 183 Violence is institutionalized by language - whether that of imperialist murder or its more subtle form of expression, which GE traces in the life of English high society. Her critique of the social practices which lead to G's subjection to Grandcourt's tyranny is based on analysis of the language employed by G's relatives. [Gascoigne talking about accounting for Grandcourt's past using a cash metaphor, Catherine's refusal to accept her mother's terms when accepting Klesmer]
• alternatives to the language and social vision of English society: Klesmer's language of musicians being "compelled to something more difficult than parliamentary eloquence" and Mordecai's idealism
• 184 Jewish culture represented for her the virtues of organic historical growth without the attendant disadvantages of the corruption of the English social organism.
• [Mordecai's] challenge is to the ruling-class alphabet - to the belief that all things may be defined by merely rearranging the sequence of predefined letters. This challenge has its methodological issue in the narrative pattern of DD: in the abrupt opening, and the fracturing of temporal and spatial continuity, and the repeated instances of coincidence and fulfilled visions. These narrative devices mark GE's departure from the smooth sequence of cause and effect, and the manipulation of predefined themes, or figures, traditionally associated with the realist novel.
• 185 [GH's dependence on imagining her free will to be entirely self-sufficient] Sully's challenge to theories of a directing, controlling ego is founded on premises drawn from contemporary developments in physiology and psychology that were to undermine the models of man that had dominated early C19 thought - the Cartesian cogito or Bentham's rational actor - and the theories of social order they had sustained. His theories offer a linguistic basis for Lewes's argument that "Consciousness is not an agent but a symptom."
  • a link also to Spencer's mechanistic sociology and liberal negative freedom
• 189 Like her previous novels, DD was written within the moral framework of organicism, and following her earlier pattern, GE employs the resources of physiological psychology to give an apparent scientific force or validity to her moral propositions. Thus, Mordecai's plans for the Jewish race are couched in language that combines the sentiments and expressions of the medieval visionary Halevi with the precision of contemporary physiological theory.
• 194 [talking about the image of GH's entanglement in the meshes of fate on the yacht] The image of the web is one employed by Lewes to define the psyche; to demonstrate the impossibility of a division between organism and environment, self and other, consciousness and the unconscious.
• 198 In the transfer and interdependence that characterise their association, GH and Deronda epitomise the "I and Thou" relationship that Feuerbach saw as the foundation of true religion - a religion that would not constitute a self-alienation by situating itself within God, but one firmly founded in humanity.
• Both the idealism of M, and the psychological intricacy of G's portrait stem, as I have argued, from the same source. Through Mordecai, GE questions atomistic and inductive science, and theories of linear causality; through G, she questions social and psychological atomism, the opposition between self and other, consciousness and the unconscious.
• 198-9 The ideals of organicism which underpin the novel are those which have determined GE's earlier work - the protagonists still strive for the integration of individual fulfilment and social duty, historical change and continuity. But the underlying model is now firmly that of Bernard and Lewes: the organism is conceived not as a fixed structure, but as interactive process. Yet, despite this unity of conception, one is aware of an impasse at the conclusion of the novel: the potentiality of D's future contrasts markedly with the barren resignation which defines Gwendolen's.
  • is it completely barren though, or is it renunciation?
• In Judaism GE found an integrated religion and culture

Conclusion

• 201 While the cyclical structure of Adam Bede had reflected GE's allegiance to the values of pastoral organicism, to the stable model of society, and a static conception of the psychological subject, the narrative form and stance of DD are perhaps best defined by the radical uncertainty which characterises the novel's interrogative opening. The text both clearly affirms the values of organic union, and displays the conditions of their impossibility.
• 204 Conflicts and divisions within the narrative structure of the novels expose the social contradictions of organic social theory.
• GE addressed the social dimensions of this question [the relationship between part and whole in a historically changing field], employing a biological model of organic interdependence to resolve the ideological conflict between theories of individualism and social integration and, on a historical plane, the demands of continuity and change. The dynamic model of the organicism to which she eventually turned, however, disturbed the delicate balance between holism and individualism which the organic metaphor had originally sustained in social ideology.
• 205 payoff: "the manifold ways in which scientific theory penetrated literary practice" (and also this is why work like Devin's and Jesse's is exciting, because it shows the reverse)