Review of Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture

Authors

Penny Gay
Judith Johnston
Catherine Waters

Date of this Version

2009

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 40 (2009)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

The inside of this volume offers exactly the pleasurable variety and range of interest promised by its outside (the beautifully reproduced cover image is Ernest Dudley Heath's Piccadilly Circus at Night, 1893). As its title suggests, the volume, divided into two sections, seeks to capture, in Part One, the diverse ways in which the Victorians explored in fiction the multiple 'turns' in new directions the age was taking, and, in Part Two, the imaginative updatings of these fictions, in literature, film and theatre, as well as in scholarship, in the burgeoning afterlife of Victorianism.

The editors note in their introduction how in George Eliot's journals 'the number and wide variety of subjects ... and the enlarging vista that each brings with it' are a palpable attraction for the author and the five essays relating to the author in Part One of this book, turning from science to travel to music among other topics, re-affirm her reputation as a touchstone for the wide cultural openness of the period. At the same time, at least two of these essays attest, richly if tangentially, to the pleasures of intellectual passion as at best equivocal for the English Victorian woman.

In 'The Mill on the Floss: "More Instruments Playing Together'" (the essay most exclusively devoted to George Eliot), Gillian Beer focuses on the significance of music in the novel both as a marker of Maggie Tulliver's emergent identity and as yielding key insights in respect of the theories of the origins of music expounded by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer respectively in the mid-nineteenth century. Where, for Darwin, music was a pre-linguistic phenomenon and (as a means for the male of the species to attract a female mate) a key element in the process of sexual selection, for Spencer, music was a derivation and intensification of speech with the power strongly to excite not only 'familiar feelings' but also 'dormant sentiments' of which the listener has had neither experience or consciousness hitherto. Beer suggests that these apparently distinct origins and functions contrapuntally meet in the character and story of Maggie Tulliver, as music both 'arouses and carries' sexual passion (through song especially) in the mutual attraction of Maggie and Stephen Guest, and 'gives voice to the power of a world beyond the narrow life within which Maggie is bound'. Beer's essay is especially good at showing how the erotic and spiritual charge of music, via the cadence of the human voice as an instrument of conversation as much as of song, is embedded in the texture of the book, and at how Eliot's allusion to composers and works 'spin[s] connection between reader and writer', thus 'enrich[ing] the hinterland' of the fiction. It is startling to be reminded that the relative impoverishment of the sound-world of the novel's inhabitants and first readers, amplifies the power of the music made and heard by the characters, and silently and readily listened to (through the novel's specific contemporary references) by the Victorian reader, in a way inaccessible to the reader of today.