Review of George Eliot's Intellectual Life

Authors

Avrom Fleishman

Date of this Version

2010

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 41 (2010)

Comments

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

Abstract

Avrom Fleishman's study of George Eliot as a Victorian intellectual comes late in a distinguished career of scholarly publication that stretches over more than forty years. The book primarily concerns itself with some large questions: What were Eliot's central ideas and how were they modified over the course of her development? How did they overlap or differ from those of her contemporaries? In working out his answers, Fleishman creates an admiring and admirable account of 'a mighty mind' (2) interested in others' theoretical systems but always independent of them, forging its own deeply ethical and ultimately tragic versions of humanism, empiricism, and progressive historicism. The account has its polemical side; Fleishman aims to rescue this Victorian thinker from the readings of poststructuralist scholars who find in Eliot a modem sense of epistemological uncertainty, from those who read Eliot through the lenses of one ideological position (Comte, Spencer, Feuerbach, etc), and from those who understand Eliot as a nostalgic political conservative.

Fleishman's ability to extract and summarize the essential points of a social theory in clear and trenchant terms is the most valuable contribution of his book. He often reads for us what George Eliot read, and then suggests both what she learned from it and what she dismissed. Thus we get pocket sketches of the arguments in works by Hennell, Spinoza, Strauss, Mackay, Mill, Comte, and Riehl, followed by careful discriminations of their thinking from the ideas of Eliot herself. The result is that she emerges as a sceptical and original social thinker, rather than a mind that absorbs the influences of others. Some surprises ensue: Eliot's thought is more closely aligned with the balance of ideas in John Stuart Mill than with any other contemporary. Comte's sense of necessary historical development gets quite a sardonic critique from Fleishman, who effectively distances both Eliot and Mill from its teleology. Spencer fares somewhat better, but would have been vivid to Eliot, Fleishman suggests, largely in his organicist view of society and his interest in sympathy. (George Henry Lewes, 'that overachieving polymath' (76), gets very limited press in this book, as do the natural sciences in general).

The young Mary Ann Evans also comes through in somewhat unexpected ways: Fleishman finds no evidence of extreme evangelical belief in his probe of her adolescent letters; it was personal asceticism rather than the theology of atonement and justification by faith that moved her. As for the famous loss of faith at twenty-one, Fleishman is quite convincing when he claims that 'the most remarkable aspect of the process was its serenity' (24); what there was of crisis was familial, not a matter of intellectual uncertainty or religious despair. His procedure here and elsewhere is to extract quotations that represent her intellectual position and summarize their import; what's missing is a sense of particular context that Eliot herself would have insisted on. Both the emotional valence and the rhetorical shaping of ideas for a particular correspondent are largely overlooked.