"The one poor word" in Middlemarch.

George Eliot's synthesis of sympathy and irony in Middlemarch (1871-72) and the impressive unity of the novel's details--of metaphors, motifs, images, and allusions--have been at the center of George Eliot criticism for many years. Granted, one does not even need deconstruction to sense imperfections in that unity, as Barbara Hardy argued long ago in examining the inadequacies of Will Ladislaw. (1) George Eliot's ethic of sympathy also raises questions about her realism. (2) Nonetheless, extremely minute details vibrate in tremolo for the attentive reader, especially when one keeps in mind that synthesis of sympathy and irony. (3) This essay will treat one very small detail indeed, a single monosyllabic adjective, an adjective that in Middlemarch distributes sympathy and irony in roughly equal portions.

The adjective, as my title implies, is the humble "poor," used as a term of commiseration and thus often followed hard by a proper noun. Excluding all other meanings of the term such as "low," "inadequate," or "impoverished," I make out 145 instances of the commiserating "poor" in Middlemarch. Its chief recipients, as one would expect, are Dorothea, Rosamond, Lydgate, and Casaubon, with Rosamond (perhaps surprisingly) leading them all, a disposition that I hope to show tells us something about how and why George Eliot mixes irony with sympathy. Rosamond gets the adjective 26 times, Dorothea 22, Casaubon 12, and Lydgate 9. But other instances, especially the first two that set the theme, are worth attending.

With wonderful portentousness for Middlemarch, the OED, to exemplify the commiserating sense of "poor," cites Sir Humphrey Davy with whom the genial Arthur Brooke dined years ago, accompanied by William Wordsworth, as we learn in the first paragraph of the second chapter. (4) In this sense, the term means "so circumstanced so as to excite one's compassion or pity," and the OED adds that "In many parts of England" the word regularly refers to "the dead of whom one knew." (5)

The adjective is one of George Eliot's verbal tics. Laurence Lerner, writing about her Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), notes one instance of the rhetorical impact of "poor." To show the unevenness of that novel, he contrasts two brief passages from one chapter concerning Mrs. Transome: the first concerns her relationship with her maid of forty years, Denner; the second deals with the heroine, Esther. The first, spare and direct, Lerner prefers to the second, heavily adjectival, especially the offensive "poor": Esther "kissed [Mrs. Transome's] poor quivering lips and eyelids." The adjective, Lerner says, "is a direct assault on the reader." (6) Even here I suspect the adjective has more meanings than the indictment suggests, as it does throughout George Eliot's fiction. For instance, in chapter 13 of "Janet's Repentance," the final story in Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), the adjective is applied to Janet Dempster three times, as the narrator prepares for the climax when her alcoholic husband Mr. Dempster forces her out of the house at midnight. It suggests not only the narrator's compassion and pity but also Janet's state as one among the living dead, a condition created by her abusive husband and her own alcoholism. "Poor Janet" lives "in leaden stupor." (7) The word appears prominently in Adam Bede (1859) as the plot moves toward Hetty Sorrel's suffering. Particularly notable is an instance in which George Eliot weds "sympathy" to the adjective. The narrator tells us that sympathy comes from suffering, such suffering as Adam Bede's in his blasted love for Hetty and his respect for Arthur Donnithorne: "Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy--the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love." (8) Here George Eliot invests "poor" with ennobling irony, related to but transcending the depreciatory sense of the word. To be "poor" in this way is to be rich with feeling, and, as Adam learns, "'feeling's a sort o' knowledge.'" (9) "Poor" passes into metaphor as it does in The Mill on the Floss.

Although The Mill on the Floss (1860) uses the adjective fewer times than Middlemarch (only 45). George Eliot's second novel embeds several senses of the word into the plot, the consequences of Mr. Tulliver's failed lawsuit and Tom's eventual repayment of the debt. At one point, just as Tom sets out to restore the family's money and respectability, the narrator juxtaposes the metaphorical and denotative meanings in a single paragraph. At sixteen, "Poor Tom was not without hopes to take refuge in," reflecting that "[b]oth Mr Glegg and Mr Deane ... had been very poor once." Tom resolves to imitate his Uncle Deane because "[i]t was intolerable to think of being poor and looked down upon all one's life." (10) George Eliot balances sympathy and judgment here. Young Tom, whatever his faults, deserves our respect for his determination to set things right, yet at the same time he is "poor" in the sense that he acts always in accordance with the worshipful materialism of the "emmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers." (11) No one in the novel is more the victim of that value than Mrs. Tulliver, and perhaps to drive the moral home, she gets the adjective 8 times, equally distributed between the narrator and other characters. (12) For that same reason, the word identifies Tulliver's sister, the desperately impoverished and perfectly named Gritty. (13) Maggie, of course, leads all the rest with 16 instances, though in her case, unlike Tom's, the word often seems a rhetorical reflex action rather than a necessity derived from the plot or the nature of the narrator's analysis. The very last instance is such a case, coming just before brother and sister go down into the raging Floss: "Tom rowed with untired vigour, and with a different speed from poor Maggie's." (14) "Poor Tom" would be more to the point, since his "vigour," so the text implies, sends them to their doom. (15) Granted that reading, "Poor Tom" would neatly address the gender bias foregrounded in the earlier parts of the novel. Indeed, Maggie is anything but "poor" at this moment, if we are to believe her dearest wish to be reunited with the beloved Tom. "Poor Maggie" seems a symptom of the notoriously vexed ending of this novel.

George Eliot, perhaps conscious that "poor" had become reflex, may thus have renounced the word deliberately when she wrote Felix Holt. In ...