George Eliot and racism: how should one read 'The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!'?(Critical essay)

A number of recent critics have accused George Eliot of racism and even anti-Semitism. Her essay 'The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!' has been widely cited to support these claims. Critics have tended to take passages from it as straightforward statements of Eliot's views which they identify with racism, ignoring the text's literary aspects, such as the complexity of the narration; the implicitly racist audience the narrator is addressing; the rhetorical strategies adopted that undermine the readership's prejudices. An awareness of the text's complex literary structure suggests that accusations of racism and anti-Semitism are simplistic or unpersuasive.

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Most of the major writers in the Victorian period can be seen as racist to a greater or lesser degree. According to Edward Said, even Marx and Mill are not immune: 'both of them seemed to have believed that such ideas as liberty, representative government, and individual happiness must not be applied to the Orient for reasons that today we would call racist'. (1) In many of these writers anti-Semitism was the most obvious form of racism, and this continued beyond the Victorian period, as is evident in such figures as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. It used to be thought that the exception to this widespread anti-Semitism and racism in general was George Eliot. Not only was she strongly pro-Jewish, notably in Daniel Deronda (1876), but she was also sympathetic to other groups subject to much prejudice, such as the Gypsies, as is evident in her verse drama The Spanish Gypsy (1868), and the Irish. However, a significant number of recent critics have nevertheless linked Eliot with racism, even with anti-Semitism.

Some of that criticism can be seen as lacking credibility, at least if one thinks convincing evidence is important. For example, Sandor Gilman draws radical conclusions from half a sentence in Deronda: 'And one man differs from another, as we all differ from the Bosjesman', (2) claiming that this assumes 'a polygenetic view of race', (3) polygenesis being the belief that races have evolved from more than one set of ancestors so that they are seen as belonging to different lineages. Polygenesis was rejected by Darwin, and its main nineteenth-century proponents were the notorious racists Robert Knox and James Hunt. Eliot's writings as a whole strongly suggest that she had no sympathy with their views and like Darwin supported monogenesis. However, Gilman's view has been accepted and taken further by some Eliot critics:

[Deronda's] strongest authorial imputation of a dehumanizing bestiality comes in the off-hand aside that types the Kalahari Bushman as an animalistically undisciplined alien[, which] speaks for an emotively entrenched scale of prejudice defined around the stigma of subhumanness. (4)

Gilman goes on to argue that this 'we' of Eliot's effectively establishes an absolute racial divide [in which] blacks occupied an antithetical position to whites [with] Jews, as Gilman concludes, fall[ing] just this side of the human on the 'scale of humanity' [...] so long as, Daniel Deronda seems to say, they conduct themselves [...] in an exemplary way [...]. Hence the clear distinction between two kinds of Jews in the text. (5)

Even the editor of the current Penguin edition of Deronda appears to accept Gilman's claim. (6) Since the Bushmen were perceived in the Victorian period as the most ancient people on Earth--hunter gatherers whose way of life had been unchanged for at least 20,000 years-and thus closest to what Darwin refers to as the 'ancestors of man', (7) to suggest that they are different in fundamental ways from readers of Daniel Deronda, or even from Europeans in general in the second half of the nineteenth century, hardly need imply polygenesis. The erection of a racist philosophy for Eliot on the basis of this comment would suggest that an ideological agenda underlies the critical perspective of some of her readers.