George Eliot U.S.: Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Perspectives

George Eliot U.S.: Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Perspectives
Monika Mueller

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The nineteenth century is a period of fertile exchanges between British and American literature. Britain and the United States shared a literary market, and their respective authors read one another avidly, reviewed one another's works, entered into correspondence and even sought mutual acquaintance. These fertile intercultural intellectual connections are well known, yet have remained largely under-explored other than on an individual scale of mutual influence. The fault lies on both sides of the disciplinary divide. It results, on the one hand, from a conservative attitude amongst scholars of British literature, who all too often regard the period as one of a monolithic Englishness that is largely concerned with itself and the political threats posed by Britain's European competitors, especially France. It also lies with scholars of American Studies who are often still busy staking a claim for an already thoroughly nationalized American culture capable of including many complex immigrant influences, while downplaying its historically prominent British components.

This is why a monograph like Monika Mueller's is thoroughly welcome. It is concerned with one of the epitomes of mid-Victorian writing, Mary Ann Evans alias George Eliot, and the manifold ways in which her writings enter a mutual interchange with those of her American contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mueller somewhat over emphatically refuses to align her monograph with traditional influence studies, of which Edward Stokes 1985 monograph Hawthorne's Influence on Dickens and George Eliot provides an example. Yet her study is also that, though in a broader sense than Stokes's in that it steps beyond stylistic comparisons and a comparison of motifs and their treatment. Its direction is that of a comparative study of ideologies as depicted in nineteenth-century literature and the way in which it travels between related, though already noticeably different cultures. This is why her monograph moves convincingly from the still fairly conservative comparison of the fallen woman theme in Adam Bede and The Scarlet Letter (whose influence on Eliot's first novel is well known) and community in Middlemarch and Beecher Stowe's Oldtown Folks to the British and American views of cultural alterity in the shape of Italy in Eliot's novels, especially Romola, Beecher Stowe's Agnes of Sorrento, and Hawthorne's The Marble Faun. Alterity ultimately becomes the strongest thread of Mueller's monograph in its comparative analysis of the relationship of notions of race, ethnicity, and national identity in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Daniel Deronda.

The analysis of the intertextual relations between the two "fallen woman" novels, The Scarlet Letter and Adam Bede, yields convincing, though hardly surprising results. They show that Eliot's later book refrains from some of the more radical liberationist stances of Hawthorne's (a fact certainly related to Eliot's precarious status as a woman openly cohabiting with a married man) and that Hawthorne's is motivated by religion while Eliot's draws its tension from the British class structure. Nonetheless, Mueller also debunks some persistent myths about nineteenth-century writing, such as the idea of a British Realism versus an American attachment to Romance. The study continues with an exemplary comparison of microcosmic social models in Beecher Stowe's Oldtown Folks and Eliot's Middlemarch.

Mueller's book then leaves this framework of largely known social and proto-feminist ground and (still) biographical motivations when she first attempts a comparative study of nineteenth-century British and American fictionalizations of Italy, both the contemporaneous Italy of ongoing national struggle towards an eventual unification and the Renaissance Italy that provided both Britain and the United States with an ambivalent cultural ideal. While Margaret Fuller struggles to accommodate her impressions of contemporary revolu¬tionary chaos, Hawthorne, in The Marble Faun, relegates contemporary politics to the background in favor of focusing on a mythological narrator whose name Donatello clearly evokes the eponymous Italian sculptor. Eliot, who also spent time in Italy, in turn creates an idealized (somewhat sterile) Italy at the time of Savonarola in Romola, a background that is also employed in Beecher Stowe's Agnes of Sorrento. While Mueller is undoubtedly right in insisting that Italy provides a testing ground for Hawthorne's and Eliot's ideas of personal and cultural maturation (following a "fortunate fall" model in the former and a Comptean one in the latter), she also emphasizes the role Italy, as the epitome of "European" cultural achievement, plays for the North American writers. They, she argues, use it to mark their own perspective as a postcolonial one. Their use of the contrast between Italian Renaissance Catholicism and their own contemporary Protestantism, however, also unites them again with the British writer Eliot. .

The theme of alterity is then continued in a kind of interior direction, which provides the most exciting section of Mueller's study. Race, ethnicity, religion and nationalism are combined and assessed comparatively in her chapter "From Uncle Tom to Daniel Deronda —and from Ethnicity to Identity." It is connected to the preceding one in that, for example, the revolutionary leader Guiseppe Mazzini is identified as a model for Eliot's Daniel Deronda and that Beecher Stowe's relative tolerance towards Otherness is shown to shift from the religious to the racial sphere. Particularly striking is the chapter's demonstration that the unease about differentiating race and ethnicity and religion and national identity, which troubles politics and Cultural Studies to the present day, is already in evidence in the fictional debates of nineteenth-century novels. Mueller provides a detailed picture by integrating the complex entanglement of gender, sexuality, and philosophy in them.

Such a high standard is hard to sustain, and thus the final section entitled "Writing Beyond the Ending?: U.S. Adaptations of George Eliot" is a slight disappointment. It does what the rest of the study steadfastly refuses to do, namely look for incidences of analogy and parallels. While the previous chapters rest on historical and cultural foundations of meticulous complexity, suddenly more than a hundred years of development—in terms of social change, altered gender roles, etc.—rush past in a flash. As a demonstration of Eliot's lasting influence, the chapter is superfluous. Yet a continuation of the complex arguments of the previous ones into the present would have required much more space. Nonetheless, the attempt to bring the topic up to date is a forgivable flaw in an otherwise excellently researched, complexly argued, and well-written work.

Rainer Emig, Amerikastudien/American Studies 51 (2006): 442-44

Written by Monika Mueller (teaches American and English literature at the University of Cologne, Germany), George Eliot U.S.: Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Perspectives is an extensive work of literary criticism and analysis that explores the complicated and reciprocal relationship between George Eliot’s fiction and the writings of her American contemporaries, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. George Eliot U.S. also scrutinizes Eliot’s lasting influence on American fiction to the modern day, and particularly contemplates modern American adaptations of her work. The evolution of a postdoctoral thesis, George Eliot U.S. is a highly scholarly and seminal contribution to literary criticism shelves, and particularly recommended for college libraries and students of Eliot’s works.

The Midwest Book Review

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