George Eliot's problem with action.(Critical Essay)

D. H. Lawrence remarked that "it was [George Eliot] who started putting all the action inside." (1) So, for example, in Felix Holt, she shifts the focus from the political revolution implied by the title of the novel to Esther Lyon's "inward revolution." (2) When George Eliot "puts things inside"--exploiting narrative's potential to describe the invisible--willing, judging, desiring, and feeling gain the same ontological status as acting. And yet, properly speaking, action is set apart by its externality. Moreover, it is only by doing that we become just or unjust, as philosophers since Aristotle (who for this reason famously privileges the element of plot or action over character in his Poetics) have argued. George Eliot, whose primary concern is always with the ethical, acknowledges this through the narrator of Daniel Deronda, who insists that "the fuller nature desires to be an agent, to create, and not merely to look on." (3) Nevertheless, in his conversational review, Henry James's Puicheria complains (i ronically, given the pace of his own late fiction) about Daniel Deronda's lack of action: "I never read a story with less current. It is not a river; it is a series of lakes." (4)

In fact, relatively little happens in most of George Eliot's books. Even the "murders" are usually, and conspicuously, crimes of inaction: Hetty's abandoning her child, Bulstrode's not telling his housekeeper to refrain from administering the liquor, and Gwendolen's hesitating to throw Grandcourt the rope. V. S. Pritchett recognizes that George Eliot has a mind "that has grown by making judgments," but these judgments are rarely allowed to find outward expression in positive action. (5) Her optimism seems to be much more about the human potential to will the right things than to do the right things. I wish to argue that George Eliot's shifting inward of action creates a series of ethical problems with which she wrestles increasingly in her novels. (6) The culmination of this struggle occurs in Daniel Deronda, in which the nature and potential of action become the dominant subject, and it is to this work that I will eventually turn. But first, by comparing her philosophical inquiries to analogous statements by philosophers from John Stuart Mill onward, I will show why the field of action becomes a battlefield for George Eliot.

George Eliot's trouble with action rests partly in her sense of the impossibility of controlling consequences. Actions, both our own and those of others, inevitably constrain our future choices. Adam Bede's narrator comments of Arthur Donnithorne: "Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds ... There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this reason--that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right." (7) Again and again, George Eliot reminds us of this lesson: Tito Melema's decision, in Romola, to sell Baldassarre's rings occasions the comment that "he had chosen his color in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his wishes." (8) And George Eliot's fear is compounded by her awareness of the irreversibility of acts, the worst kind of "woeful progeny" (FH, p. 11). There is a "dreadful vitality of deeds"--"children may be strangled, but deeds never" (R, p. 156 ). One can sense her terror in this analogy. In her novels, the smallest actions can bring about vast and unimaginable consequences.

So our deeds are not completely within our control; this is the great lesson Harold Transome must learn in Felix Holt: "It was the most serious moment in Harold Transome's life: for the first time the iron had entered into his soul, and he felt the hard pressure of our common lot, the yoke of that mighty resistless destiny laid upon us by the acts of other men as well as our own" (FH, p. 385). The yoke of resistless destiny is a recurrent theme in George Eliot's writing. In the first motto she originated for a chapter, one gentleman declares: "Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves," only to be reminded: "Ay, truly: but I think it is the world / That brings the iron." (9) In her favorite metaphor for this scenario, free will is constrained in the web of human interaction. Through the voice of Felix, she warns each person to take care how his "tugging will act on the fine widespread network of society in which he is fast meshed." (10) Mrs. Transome, who "felt the fatal threads about her" (FH, p. 94), ha s learned the hard way that activity can entangle the struggler in the meshes of her own past deeds.

Hannah Arendt--who, like George Eliot, is a woman thinker interested in the relationship between thought and action at a time when theories have led to acts of atrocity (the French Revolution stands as precedent to the far-greater horrors of the period of Hitler and Stalin)--uses the same figure. She describes, in terms remarkably close to George Eliot's, the role of action in linking individual character to community:

The disclosure of the "who" through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action, always fall into an already existing web where their immediate consequences can be felt. Together they start a new process which eventually emerges as the unique life story of the new-comer, affecting uniquely the life stories of all those with whom he comes into contact. It is because of this already existing web of human relationships, with its innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions, that action almost never achieves its purpose; but it is also because of this medium, in which action alone is real, that it "produces" stories.

Arendt continues by denying the concept of the authorship of one's own story: "although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or produce." (11)