Kreisel 2003

Deanna Kreisel. "Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in Adam Bede." ELH 70.2 (Summer 2003), 541-574.

• is it a commonplace to refer to the narrator of Adam Bede (or Eliot novels generally) as "he," or EB White style proscriptive grammar? (see her note on 570 for a rationale)
• 542 ...if E's philosophizing narrator does not agree with Irwine's assessment, and instead would prefer a rattling good plot to openness and honesty between friends, then he (and by extension E) advocates both unintrusiveness and secrecy.
• important that Irwine's realization of his error is free indirect discourse rather than direct narratorial intervention, this "signals her own ambivalence about the practices of secrecy and intrusiveness that she herself engages in as an author."
• "problem of the interventionist narrator" and of "gendered authorship" - argument: "Eliot's negotiation of the problem of female authorship should be read within the context of a set of metaphors for (and of) literary creation which circulated in Vic culture as a whole.... E's masculine incognito - her own repository of secrecy - posed a serious problem for this [maternal] guarantee of feminine sympathy and material insight and, as I will argue, became a projection for several narratological problems with which she grappled throughout her career."
• GE's obsession with concealment through her "incognito" at this point in her career
• 545 While the authority of masculinity is undeniably attractive...it also undermines what E sees as the real source of the sympathetic identification that is the heart of her novelistic project: her womanhood.
• 546 How, then, to assume the masculine voice and retain the feminine sympathetic insight?
• Just as several critics have noted the parallels between Latimer's curse [in Lifted Veil, to read others' minds] and the epistemological crisis of the protomodern narrator, so can we see in Daniel's [Deronda] dilemma Eliot's commentary on the process of narrating, and novel-writing, more generally.
• 548 For Eliot, "information" and "analysis" are coded masculine, while "sympathy" is consistently associated with femininity. [using terms from "Silly Novels"]
• the image of the cannon-making [Ch 32] in Deronda: "...we can also read it as a meditation on the narratological problem Eliot struggles with her entire career: to combine, in one figure, the incisive analytical vision of the masculine narrator with the sympathetic insight of the womanly author."
• 549 the tension between feminine sympathy/masculine analysis is homologous to the painterly/scientific and natural historical/experimental dialectic between narrative modes which Richard Menke and Shuttleworth 1984 identify and are (she argues) present throughout her career, not in a teleological arc toward Deronda (contra those two)
• 550 Eliot's habit is to use the [narratorial] intervention not only to direct her readers' interpretation of the plot (to defend the plausibility of her tale), but also to superintend their philosophical engagement with theories of narrative and literary representation generally.
• 552ff scenes in Ch 1 of Adam and the horseman pausing for analysis
• 556 a "taxonomy of pauses" in the novel
• Realism, as E envisions it, requires the pause. Sympathetic identification with individual characters -- what Daniel possesses and E hopes to inculcate in her readers by example - is only one part of the project of realism: what we might call the synchronic component. The diachronic component is the tracing of actions and consequences, an awareness of the far-reaching repercussions on our fellow human beings of any potential act, however seemingly isolated.
  • interesting potential relations to print/serial form, Hughes & Lund 1991
• 558 necessary and yet dangerous: "...too much sympathy threatens to nullify the subject (D Deronda, Latimer, the hole at the center of the cannon), yet too much reflective analysis threatens to nullify the object (the striding carpenter[whom the horseman objectifies], the soon to be lumber beech tree)."
• ...the novel is envisioned by its author as both a perfectly enclosed system of cause and effect and an accurate depiction of reality. At the same time, it is a novel concerned above all else with concealment. The relationship between these two characteristics is complex and problematic.
• 559 Concealment is necessary to narrative, while the strictures of sympathetic realism demand that it be condemned.
• part of the crux of this argument is the identity between narrator and author
• 560 Hetty represents Eliot's nightmare possibility of female authorship: her narrative mode, as opposed to Mr. Irwine's, is one in which concealment threatens to halt the unfolding of consequence which is the author's central ethical and artistic project.
• 561 It is Hetty's pregnancy alone which prevents the neat resolution of the dilemma -- and thus it is her pregnancy alone which is also the enabling event of the novel's real plot. Through the operations of the woman's body a narrative is generated, a species of ecriture feminine, which challenges the stability and readability of the dominant, masculine plot [which Arthur and Adam have worked out between themselves].
• Hetty as androgynous: sexy and fertile but unmaternal and cold
• 566 turns to 18th/19th century discourses about midwifery and the obstetrician or man-midwife: "The association of male accoucheurs with concealment, secrecy, and murderous intent is ultimately bound up with a deep distrust of their appropriate gender identification."
• 567 The text itself, at the level of plot, enacts this concern with concealment in the odd non-narration of Hetty's childbirth and murder.