Middlemarch
The English Heroine and the Polish Rebel(lions)
George Eliot’s authorial trajectory mirrors the general historical shift of the novel’s focus from class to nation that was described in the introduction.
Deborah Nord, a scholar whose work on George Eliot I elaborate on below, identifies this trajectory as the author’s shift of focus “from disinherited individual to disinherited nation.”1 Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede (1859), echoes the story lines of Defoe’s and Richardson’s well- known works as it depicts the seduction of a naive servant girl by a spoiled young squire. Silas Marner (1861) and Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) both engage class issues by featuring a person of humble origins who turns out to be an inheritor of a great fortune. It is not until Eliot’s last two novels, Middlemarch (1871) and Daniel Deronda (1876), that ethnic outsiders become determining pro-tagonists in the story— the first Polish and the second Jewish— and present romantic possibilities for the English heroines. The eponymous hero of Dan-iel Deronda, in fact, in a reversal of the typical plots mentioned above, is an English aristocrat who discovers and accepts his humble Jewish origins.
A possible reason for this shift in Eliot’s focus may be the Second Reform Bill, which was passed in 1867, that is, after the writing of Felix Holt and before Middlemarch. The First Reform Bill, which was passed in 1832 and on which the actions in both these novels are centered, was largely a disap-pointment. Although it did almost double the franchise by extending it to the majority of the middle class and thus ending the aristocracy’s exclusive hold on power, it ensured that political control remain tied to the land and its owners. The bill gave any adult male who owned or leased £10 worth of land the right to vote, but a tenant’s dependence on his landlord still made him likely to vote the same way as his boss. The Second Reform Bill, which tripled the electorate and extended democracy to urban England, relieved a lot of the tensions that were the focus of Eliot’s earlier novels.2 Although Felix Holt and Middlemarch both cover the events surrounding the First Reform Bill, Middlemarch has the advantage of double hindsight as a work written after passage of the Second Reform Bill, which rectified the
short-comings of the First. Middlemarch addresses the Reform Bill and highlights class disparity by portraying the heroine’s concern for the upgrading of ten-ants’ cottages, but the main event that stirs up unrest in the novel is the appearance of a man of “foreign extraction” (336), who arouses suspicion among both the rich and the poor.
Although national concerns inform the latter part of George Eliot’s career, her entire oeuvre demonstrates her ongoing interest in the Slavic world, an interest that has heretofore been grossly overlooked by George Eliot scholar-ship. While inquiries into her position vis- à- vis English colonialism abound, several excellent studies of her relationship to Germany exist, and there is even a monograph on her view of Italy, with the exception of one chapter on Middlemarch at the end of a book cleverly titled The Other East and Nineteenth- Century British Literature, not one major publication has been devoted to her portrayal of Europe’s eastern half.3 The western Slavs espe-cially occupy Eliot’s imagination, starting with Countess Czerlaski’s dead husband in her first work of fiction, “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton” (1857), and ending with Herr Klesmer and Mirah Lapidoth in her last novel, Daniel Deronda. It is Middlemarch, however, her best- known work, that features Will Ladislaw, a man marked by his “queer genealogy”
(676) due to his Polish ancestry, as one of its main protagonists.
Middlemarch stands out from the rest of the novels discussed in this part of the book as one with a happy ending. In comparison to the unhappily married young women of Anna Karenina, Effi Briest, and Madame Bova-ry, the heroine of Middlemarch— Miss Dorothea Brooke, who becomes the unfortunate Mrs. Casaubon— not only survives the end of the novel, but her stifling old husband conveniently dies of a heart condition, which frees her to enjoy a happy second marriage without committing adultery. This obser-vation must be tempered, however, with the reminder that the incriminating codicil to her first husband’s will taints her second marriage with the aura of betrayal. The jealous Edward Casaubon, suspicious of his young wife’s feelings for his younger cousin, decides to divest her of his fortune should she marry Will Ladislaw after his death. When her family members discuss Casaubon’s dishonorable act and face their own fears as to the gossip that is about to ensue, her brother- in- law and former suitor, Sir James Chettam, worries that “the world will suppose that she gave him some reason” (455) for the will’s codicil. Nevertheless, as far as the laws of church and state are concerned, Dorothea engages in no official breach in entering into her sec-ond, happy marriage. Her chief fault, as encapsulated by Sir James, is mar-rying “a man so marked out by her husband’s will, that delicacy ought to have forbidden her from seeing him again— who takes her out of her prop-er rank— into povprop-erty” (766). The disturbprop-er of marital and societal peace in Middlemarch also fares immeasurably better than his fictional counter-parts; whereas Major Crampas gets shot in Effi Briest and Count Vronsky
is sent off to war with Turkey in the epilogue of Anna Karenina, Will La-dislaw not only wins the girl but also a seat in Parliament. The primacy of Middlemarch in the English literary canon gives us all the more reason to investigate the novel’s incorporation of a Pole of “dangerously mixed blood”
(435) so intimately— sexually and politically— into its fabric.
Contemporary Scholarship on Eastern Europe
The opening of the Prelude to Middlemarch reads thus: “Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how that mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa” (3). Relying on this captivating first line in her intro-duction to Middlemarch in the Twenty- First Century, Karen Chase invites critics and readers to submit the novel itself to “the varying experiments of Time.”4 Middlemarch has, since its first appearance, primarily been asso-ciated with “the Woman Question,” as has been typical for novels of adul-tery.5 The novel’s emphasis on reform, both political and medical, is another of its important topics that still lends itself to fruitful rereadings.6 Finally, Eliot’s interest in science, combined with her close relationship to Herbert Spencer, is inseparable from her fiction.7 Ladislaw’s mixed Polish blood will be shown to bear on all of the novel’s major considerations just reviewed, and these will be addressed in light of recent scholarship on Eastern Eu-rope, as well as scholarship from Eastern Europe. The changes wrought by
“the varying experiments of Time” in Eastern Europe in the past couple of decades have yielded scholarship on the region that can illuminate not only Ladislaw’s role in Middlemarch, both town and novel, but also the mostly negative reception he has encountered among both readers and critics.
Just as Edward Said makes a convincing claim that orientalism “has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world,”8 so Larry Wolff declares that “it was Western Europe that invented Eastern Europe as its complemen-tary other half.”9 (Incidentally, beginning with Said is apropos, since in the introduction to his seminal work he recalls Middlemarch as a novel conscious of the role of German scholarship in the rise of orientalism and quotes Ladi-slaw’s remark to Dorothea regarding her husband’s scholarly limitations—
specifically, his lack of knowledge of German— “He is not an Orientalist, you know.”)10 Wolff demonstrates how the conceptual boundary between civiliza-tion and barbarism in Europe was redrawn during the Enlightenment, from an axis separating the north from the south to one separating the west from the east. When the cultural centers of Europe were located in classical Greece and Rome, and later in Renaissance Italy, countries such as Poland and Rus-sia were imagined as northern in European cultural geography. The rise of the French Empire and the influence of French philosophy in the eighteenth
century shifted the axis as the philosophes began corresponding with Russian royalty and testing their political theories in the “experimental domain” of Eastern Europe.11 Wolff’s book offers a fascinating account of Voltaire’s and Catherine the Great’s admiration for each other, as well as Denis Diderot’s visit to the (in)famous German empress of All the Russias. In contrast to these two French Russophiles, Wolff shows that Rousseau wrote essays in support of Poland, which was under Catherine’s thumb at the time, while Catherine’s famous lover, Grigory Orlov, invited the father of romanticism to discover the modern- day “noble savage” in Russia’s peasants. Since Wolff shows that
“Eastern Europe” is not a Cold War term but rather dates back to the eigh-teenth century, this means that it was influential in George Eliot’s historical milieu and not merely a later designation that can retroactively be project-ed onto her fiction. The French and German Enlightenment thinkers, who played the major role of “inventing” Eastern Europe, did not depict the place so much as Western Europe’s opposite— that function was fulfilled by non- Europeans— but rather, in the words of Wolff (borrowing from Honoré de Balzac’s La Cousine Bette), as “the geographic frontier between Europe and Asia” and “the philosophical frontier between civilization and barbarism.”12 Although English intellectuals do not figure large in Wolff’s work, they were undoubtedly influenced by their continental neighbors. George Eliot, as has been well established, was especially influenced by German thought, and I demonstrate in this chapter how this influence affected her portrayal of Ladi-slaw and other Eastern Europeans.
While English colonialism, as Said has shown, rested on a discourse of racial otherness that delineated a firm line between the empire and those of its subjects who lived outside of Europe’s boundaries, Will Ladislaw, a de-scendant of “a Polish refugee who gave lessons for his bread” (343), muddles those categories. An offspring of a people whose Europeanness, whiteness, and other signifiers of power are unclear, he presents a curious epistemolog-ical problem for his fictional contemporaries. Neither a proper Englishman nor a colonial subject, he is marked by his already mentioned “dangerously mixed blood” and “queer genealogy,” a topic of much debate among his Middlemarch neighbors. Ladislaw has been equally epistemologically prob-lematic for Eliot’s readers and critics, who have found him difficult to clas-sify at best and just plain distasteful at worst. In a letter to John Blackwood dated September 19, 1873, Eliot relates the following humorous encounter she had with a couple of Middlemarch readers: “When I was at Oxford in May, two ladies came up to me after dinner: one said, ‘How could you let Dorothea marry that Casaubon?’ The other: ‘O I understand her doing that;
but why did you let her marry the other fellow, whom I cannot bear?’”13 The latter of the two ladies, as it appears, could not even “bear” to mention Ladislaw’s name; her substitution of the term “other fellow” is as apt for his reception as it is theoretically productive.
When it comes to Eliot’s fellow authors, Henry James seemed downright offended by Ladislaw, famously pronouncing him, in his review of Middle-march for the Galaxy, Eliot’s “only eminent failure in the book.” Ladislaw was, for James, “a woman’s man”; he “lacks sharpness of outline and color”
and “remains vague and impalpable to the end.”14 When it comes to more contemporary literary scholars, Jerome Beaty read him as a mere precursor to Daniel Deronda,15 about whom later, and Deborah Nord has more re-cently assessed him within Eliot’s oeuvre as a “transition from the largely figurative strangeness of Maggie Tulliver— and Silas Marner before her— to the actual, although hidden, foreign origins of both Fedalma and Daniel Deronda.”16 All of these assessments, ranging from the earliest responses to the novel to twenty- first- century scholarship, focus on the ambiguity of Will Ladislaw. They use a vocabulary reflective of the liminal identity that has characterized Eastern Europe, the space described as a philosophical and geographic “frontier” by Wolff and one endowed with, we recall from the introduction, “imputed ambiguity” according to Todorova.
It is surprising that neither the Cold War era of the twentieth century nor the more recently burgeoning age of cultural studies inspired more interest in the significance of Will Ladislaw’s national heritage. The issue has been highlighted, as I discuss, by two scholars writing from a Polish university and for a Polish journal, but the “much abused young man”17 has yet to come into his own in the mainstream Anglo- American academic conver-sation. The pervasive dislike of Ladislaw, George Eliot’s most prominent character with connections to Eastern Europe, may be a possible reason for this neglect, as well as the neglect of the role of Eastern Europe more broadly in George Eliot scholarship.
Marrying a man of “bad origin” (766) and one for whom she must give up her widow’s inheritance allows Dorothea Brooke to live out a smaller, domesticated version of the “epic life” (3) of St. Theresa within the limits— even if they are the outer limits— of Victorian decorum. It is a compromise with which her readers and critics could never quite come to terms. Although the author herself anticipates this when she writes of Dorothea in the Finale that “many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother” (783), Dorothea’s becoming a wife and mother per se has not been so much in question as her becoming the wife of Will Ladislaw. Yet it is precisely Ladislaw’s lack of roots, suitable to the romantic aesthetic of the 1830s in which the novel is situated, that makes him the right kind of match for the overly zealous Dorothea. By extension, this also makes him the right kind of match for a country in dire need of the reforms that provide the immediate political context of the novel. If his foreign origins satisfy the heroine’s desire “to lead a grand life here— now— in England”
(27), they are also enmeshed in the solving of the nation’s most pressing political problems, as I show later.
“Polish Fever” and Will Ladislaw
In an article candidly titled “What Is a Pole Doing in Middlemarch?,” David Malcolm makes a case that the political goings- on in nineteenth- century Europe would have made Eliot’s contemporaries keenly aware of the sig-nificance of Ladislaw’s Polish heritage. Malcolm reminds us that Poland ceased to exist after its third partition between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1795. Two Polish rebellions against Russia, which gained the largest area of Poland in the partitions, took place during the course of the following century, in 1830– 31 and in 1863– 64. The first one, although never directly referred to in Middlemarch, happened during the period covered by the nov-el (1829– 32); the second one occurred eight years prior to its publication, being thus within the experience of the author and the audience. Malcolm points out that both rebellions provoked “international sympathy with the Poles, and outrage against Tsarist Russia,”18 which a closer look into the his-tory of Anglo- Polish relations at the time confirms. Before reviewing those relations, it is worth pausing to reflect on the fact that Malcolm’s article was written at the University of Gdansk during the time of the rising Soli-darity movement. The late twentieth- century anti- Russian resistance move-ment must have provided a poignant context for discussing the country’s nineteenth- century political woes, including their relevance to England and one of its most famous novels.
The Russian quashing of the first rebellion spawned a wave of Polish em-igration to Western Europe and the United States. This coincided with the movement toward the First Reform Bill in England, where Polish patriots inspired those pleading the cause of the English working classes. The greater freedoms accorded by the bill were favorable to Polish emigrants working to garner international support, and those who were thrown out of France and Belgium for these activities not only found shelter but also received an exile’s allowance in England.19 By the 1863 rebellion, the Polish cause was propa-gated diligently by the emigrants of the 1830s and again found a receptive ear among their English audience, who read reports and letters from War-saw in the newspapers and attended public support meetings. The country seemed unanimously in favor of Poland, while the government was reluctant to wage another war against Russia, the Crimean War having been fought in the preceding decade. The issue was discussed in Parliament, which was aided by France and Austria in its attempt at diplomatic interventions, but Russia was ultimately left unfettered in brutally quashing the second rebel-lion and russifying Poland even further.20
The “Polish fever” that swept England in the 1830s reached such a pitch that beggars from other countries craftily exploited the nation’s sympathies and, counting especially on the romantic fantasies of the “fair sex,” managed to obtain money and lodgings by passing themselves off as impoverished Polish princes. The popular Victorian journalist Andrew Halliday, writing in the 1862 supplemental volume of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, recalls these events in a section titled “Foreign Beggars”
and warns his audience that “it will not do to mistake every vagabond refu-gee for a noble exile.”21 “To be a Pole and in distress, was almost a sufficient introduction,” Halliday states, as well as “so excellent an opportunity for that class of foreign swindlers which haunt roulette tables and are the pest of second- rate hotels abroad.”22 He writes:
Crowds of adventurers, ‘got up’ in furs, and cloaks, and playhouse dresses, with padded breasts and long moustachios, flocked to En-gland, and assuming the title of count, and giving out that their patrimony had been sequestered by the Emperor of Russia, easily obtained a hearing and a footing in many English families, whose heads would not have received one of their own countrymen except with the usual credentials.23
He also describes a certain imprisoned Adolphus Czapolinski, “one of the most extraordinary of the beggars of the present day.”24 Czapolinski was actually Polish, as Halliday informs his readers, but passed himself off as Captain Noodt, another real person, whose identity he stole.
He also describes a certain imprisoned Adolphus Czapolinski, “one of the most extraordinary of the beggars of the present day.”24 Czapolinski was actually Polish, as Halliday informs his readers, but passed himself off as Captain Noodt, another real person, whose identity he stole.