Review of George Eliot's Grammar of Being

Authors

Melissa Anne Raines

Date of this Version

2011

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 42 (2011)

Comments

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

Abstract

Readers of The George Eliot Review will be familiar with the work of Melissa Anne Raines, which began with the publication of her prize-winning essay for the George Eliot Fellowship, and was followed by several articles, two in this journal, now part of this important book. It had its origin in words from Felix Bolt: 'vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of human existence', said to be 'a precursor to the famous lines ... from Middlemarch ... "the roar that lies on the other side of silence'“, and the first statement of what Raines calls George Eliot's most 'crucial theme ... the fundamental need for, but ultimately limited nature of, human sympathy'. The key word is 'vibrations': quoting the psychologist Herbert Spencer, and two scholars of Victorian psychology, Rick Rylance and Sally Shuttleworth, Raines claims that George Eliot is using 'the language of the nerves’.

The close analysis of this language of the nerves, and its intense if 'limited' effect on our sympathy and empathy, begins with two words from the first chapter of Felix Bolt, 'someone’, and the observation that 'the word choice is particularly fitting, as even Mrs. Transome, the mother of this "someone" is unsure of what kind of person is returning'. The scrutiny of lexis and syntax is slow, concentrated and careful, here tracking 'the persistent language of excited hesitation', and picking out beginnings of sentences, like 'Yes; but', 'And yet’, and 'Still’, each said to function 'as a small, painful linguistic twinge'. She also analyses complete sentences, that progress 'in rhythmic waves almost in response to the short introductory phrases, alternating so that either hope or doubt comes out on top, but only slightly so, as the lines begin to mimic the undulations of the nervous wanderings of Mrs. Transome's own consciousness'. She says that one sentence seems 'slightly out of order': 'there were reasons why she had not been enraptured when her son had written to her only when he was on the eve of returning that he already had an heir born to him' , and there follows an identification of that 'already' as an instance of what Spencer called 'a blow' to the consciousness, and Raines calls 'a grammatical shock', setting up 'vibrations that intensify the reader's experience of the text, so that the grammar beneath the story becomes analogous to the subtly influential private world ... .'