Embodied Dispositions, Meredithian Slips

Abstract

If George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil articulates mid-century anxiety about the mind’s tendency toward repetition and the effects of habit on both individual and communal consciousness, George Meredith’s 1879 novel The Egoist offers a palliative in the drawing-room of high comedy. Eliot’s self-conscious first-person narrator brings about the melancholic paralysis that he purports to describe; he lays bare habit’s power to naturalize and authorize the repetition of the past. The Egoist satirizes this operation, creating ironic distance by portraying the man of habit through the viewpoints of other characters, most notably the novel’s witty, clear-sighted women. Renovating the long tradition of English comedy for a new age, Meredith shows habitual personality to be not only a kind of inheritance, a lineage, a re-presentation . in this case, the replication of a ‘pattern’ character under primogeniture more volatile than the transfer of the estate - but also a productive source of laughter and social vision. It is the customary ground against which the bright comic spirit can, indeed must, emerge.