Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede: Fictions of Female Sacrifice

Abstract

George Eliot’s fictions, like her life, at once reflect, expose and undermine the hierarchical ideologies of patriarchy. Subversion was not necessarily a fully conscious strategy on Eliot’s part, however. As Mary Poovey has noted, the female writer’s responses to the restrictions that bind her can create in her work, even without her knowledge, contradictions that ‘may emerge in the discrepancy between [her] explicit aesthetic program and the emotional affect the text generates’.¹ In Eliot’s fiction, such incongruities appear most frequently in the self-subverting structure of her plots; in the exaggeratedly male or the ambivalently androgynous voices that tell her stories; and in the overdetermined position created for the reader by those plots and voices — a position that can lead the reader to supplement and to resist the text’s apparent or explicit meaning. Often, Eliot’s fictions elicit a double or a multiple reading, one which emerges from a radical disjunction between, on the one hand, the aims achieved by the conventional plot and voice and, on the other hand, the desire for a different story and treatment fostered by the narrative’s detailed attention to the consequences of sexual difference in patriarchal culture: a ‘gender plot’ works against the grain of the conventional narrative of romantic love or personal development, exposing its privileging of the masculine.