Believing is Seeing: George Eliot’s Past Effects

Abstract

When George Henry Lewes was hard at work on The Physiology of Common Life (1859), coining terms like ‘stream of consciousness’ (often attributed erroneously to William James in his Principles of Psychology of 1890), his partner George Eliot was busy in another room in the house they shared at Holly Lodge, Wimbledon, writing The Mill on the Floss (I860).² Or at least she was trying to write: Eliot encountered enormous difficulty, if not a veritable crisis, in beginning this ambitious, more autobiographical new work after the success of Adam Bede (1859) and at the very moment when her identity as a woman (and, more to the point, as the other ‘Mrs Lewes’) seemed about to become public. Indeed, the text she was writing in her room at Holly Lodge in early 1859 was more likely to have been the one she turned to in anguish instead, a dark fantasy, The Lifted Veil (1859). This chapter will show how this text, a seeming outlier in the Eliot canon, comes into sharper focus when read as a cautionary tale about the effects of not being attuned to the generative potential of habit explored in Chapter 1 a warning to readers that was indeed born of painful personal experience for Eliot and that reverberated in her writing through the rest of her career, including such major works as Daniel Deronda (1876), Eliot’s last completed novel and the only one she set in the contemporary Victorian present. It constitutes an instance of what Foucault called ‘straying afield’ of oneself, an effect of the passion for knowledge that is less an accumulation than a transformation.

After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledge - ableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself?

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)¹