Death and Recollection: The Elegiac Dimension of Scenes of Clerical Life

Authors

John Rignall

Date of this Version

2009

Document Type

Article

Citation

George Eliot Review 40 (Special Issue, 2009)

Comments

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

Abstract

Perversely, though perhaps appropriately for a paper on death, I want to begin at the end. George Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda, ends with a good death: that of Ezra Mordecai, dying with the arms of Mirah and Deronda around him, and feeling 'an ocean of peace beneath him'. The deaths that immediately precede it in her fiction, Grandcourt's drowning in the same novel, or the deaths of Featherstone, Casaubon and Raffles in Middlemarch are of a different order: those figures go more or less unlamented to their graves, and their passing may even be a form of liberation for those who outlive them. Death can, of course, work in different ways in the novel, but it is striking how in George Eliot's case, to adapt the words of the other Eliot, in her end is her beginning, for the central event of her first story, 'Amos Barton', is another 'good' death, that of the much loved, angelic Milly Barton in the company of her grieving family. Death frames George Eliot's life's work as a novelist and it marks her first book with particular intensity, with the deaths of Wybrow and Caterina, and of Dempster and Tryan playing a central part in the other two stories. What I want to reflect upon here are the implications of this prominent concern and what I see to be the resulting elegiac strain in Scenes of Clerical Life.