DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Narration in Middlemarch Revisited

Authors

K.M. Newton

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

In a previously published article entitled 'The Role of the Narrator in George Eliot's Novels',1 I attempted to defend her narrator (particularly in regard to Middlemarch) from a variety of critical attacks. The main points of my argument were: (I) that the narrator should not be identified with Eliot herself as it often is but is a persona with a tone of voice separate from the author and thus both integrated into the fiction and central to its structure; (2) form and realism were reconciled by the fact that the narrator was represented as a historical novelist writing a novel about people and situations that were real for him (or her), the narrator not being gender specific after Adam Bede; (3) the narrator's knowledge of what is going on in the minds of the characters does not indicate Godlike omniscience but is rather a historical novelist's reconstruction of their inner lives using techniques and devices associated with the novel as a literary genre; (4) the formal organization of the novels, such as parallelism between characters and situations, does not imply that reality in itself has immanent form; (5) the narrator does not disguise the fact that he (or she) has a point of view in relation to ethical, philosophical and political questions and that this shapes his (or her) representation of reality; (6) narration must always be interpretation.

I still broadly agree with these points but there are some issues in regard to narration in Eliot that still need to be addressed, and again I shall focus mainly on Middlemarch. The terms 'reliable' and 'unreliable' are common in the theory of narrative. Is Eliot's narrator 'reliable' in that the reader is expected to accept and trust the narrator's representation of reality? What if the reader or some readers disagree with the narrator's judgements, and of course the narrator in Middlemarch is exceptionally 'intrusive'? Does this make the narrator 'unreliable' for these readers? Dorothea Barrett in her book Vocation and Desire: George Eliot's Heroines accepts that Eliot intends her narration to be 'reliable' but finds the narrator a conservative figure and refuses to accept what she sees as the conservative ideology being promulgated by this narrator. Her solution to the problem is to identify this conservative narrator with 'Marian Lewes' but to discern a more radical ideology in the subtext of the novel which she attributes to the artist 'George Eliot', who remains in contact at an unconscious level with the radicalism of the earlier self of the author. In effect then the narration becomes 'unreliable' even if Eliot as author at a conscious level did not intend it to be: 'Marian Lewes clearly intends to recommend [submissiveness], but the texts themselves subvert her intention'.