Abstract
In Chapter 18 of Adam Bede, the narrator describes Adam Bede’s thoughts during the church service and highlights how ‘a certain consciousness of our entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen sensibility’. To justify such a blending, the narrator points out that ‘the secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past’ (AB, 18:300). In her novels and other writings, George Eliot returns time and again to this theme of the formation of relations in time — ‘a continual stream of rhythmic memories’ (MF, 4:3:256) — but it is the predominant sense of the collective that from the very beginning defines the meaning of these memories. The collective scope is never confined to the communities imagined in the fictional works; it always has implications for the society in which Eliot herself was historically situated. This study explores ‘memory’ in the work of George Eliot primarily as communal memory, though personal memory is treated as a related issue. ‘Communal memory’ here means forms, both fictional and real, of collective mentality and moral consciousness, shared feelings, manners, rituals, customs as well as verbal expressions, which have evolved over generations. They constitute the deep-running continuity of human life.
Clio was figured by the ancients as the eldest daughter of Memory, and chief of the Muses; which dignity, whether we regard the essential qualities of her art, or its practice and acceptance among men, we shall still find to have been fitly bestowed.
(Thomas Carlyle, ‘On History’, WTC, XXVII, 83)
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Notes
I borrow this distinction in nineteenth-century thought from J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge, 1966), p. xv.
Several critics have presented detailed and lucid accounts of the influence of Comte, Lewes, and Ludwig Feuerbach. See especially the following: Bernard J. Paris, Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (Detroit, 1965);
Basil Willey, Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (1949; Harmondsworth, 1964);
U. C. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel: George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler (Princeton, 1965); and
George Levine, ‘Intelligence as Deception’, in George Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by George R. Creeger (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970), pp. 107–23. This study builds on these valuable pioneering works, but will attempt to further clarify certain important issues by focusing on the mechanism of memory. Wherever necessary I shall use important materials in the Eliot notebooks to achieve a fuller and more accurate account of her conception of communal memory. The chief merits of the more recent critical studies lie in their excellent insights into the historiographical significance of her concern with communal consciousness. Their historical contexts are, however, not identical with mine, though there is some overlap. Moreover, these critical studies usually address a larger issue. For examples, see
Elinor Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’: The Mythological School of Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880 (Cambridge, 1975);
Felicia Bonaparte, The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot’s Poetic Imagination (Brighton, 1979);
Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860 (Cambridge, 1980);
William Myers, The Teaching of George Eliot (Leicester, 1984);
Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge, 1984);
Gillian Beer, ‘Origins and Oblivion in Victorian Narrative’, in her Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (London, 1989), pp. 12–33;
David Carroll, George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations: A Reading of the Novels (Cambridge, 1992);
Jim Reilly, Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot (London, 1993);
Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (Oxford, 1994).
See Ashton, German Idea, pp. 70–1, and John D. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History (Oxford, 1985), pp. 9–10 and 49–50.
See Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’, pp. 225–91; W. J. Harvey, ‘The Intellectual Background of the Novel: Casaubon and Lydgate’, in ‘Middlemarch’: Critical Approaches to the Novel, edited by Barbara Hardy (London, 1967), pp. 25–37;
Bernard J. Paris, ‘George Eliot and the Higher Criticism’, Anglia, 84 (1966), pp. 59–73; and Ashton, German Idea.
I am indebted to the following studies for my discussion of Carlyle: John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London, 1953);
George Levine, The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman (Princeton, 1968);
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973);
Peter Allan Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold and Pater (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Ashton, German Idea; Rosenberg, Carlyle;
J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981); and
Gillian Beer, ‘Carlylean Transports’, Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (London, 1989), pp. 74–98.
See Mary Warnock, Memory (London, 1987), p. 15.
James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) was circulating among Eliot’s friends in 1852 and Lewes read it in 1869 (L, II, 38 and L, V, 33).
Two studies have particularly highlighted this very important aspect of the Lockean concept. See David Rapaport, ‘Locke: The Borderland of Sensualism and Empiricism’, in his The History of the Concept of Association of Ideas (New York, 1974) and
Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Baltimore, 1991), especially pp. 1–43.
Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore, 1971), p. 219. Lewes in fact published a favourable review of Spencer’s Principles of Psychology in the Saturday Review in 1856 (see Rosemary Ashton, G. H. Lewes: A Life (Oxford, 1991), p. 171).
For an examination of Eliot’s writings in the light of Darwinian evolutionary theory, see Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London, 1983).
See, for example, Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge and Paris, 1988).
It would be misleading to take these views merely as hers; there is a notice at the beginning of the first volume of the Third Series announcing that the book ‘has been printed from his [Lewes’s] manuscript with no other alterations than such as it is felt certain that he would have sanctioned’ (SP, frontispiece). For the changes of substance that Eliot made in editing, see K. K. Collins, ‘G. H. Lewes Revised: George Eliot and the Moral Sense’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1978), pp. 463–92.
See Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (London, 1967), pp. 71–9, for a discussion of Tönnies’s distinction. A good account of the complexity and ambiguity of Tönnies’s terminology can be found in
Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, 1993), pp. 42–5. For a discussion of Eliot’s novels primarily in terms of Tönnies’s distinction, see
Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (Berkeley, 1984), pp. 14–17 and 94–149.
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© 2000 Hao Li
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Li, H. (2000). Introduction: Memory, History and George Eliot. In: Memory and History in George Eliot. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598607_1
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