George Eliot: The Conservative

The defining paradox of George Eliot's Felix Holt and the central claim of this essay is that the novel's radicalism and its conservatism amount to the same thing. What Felix himself discovers—above all through his failed effort to guide the election-day mob—is that purity of intention is no guarantee of success. To act is to see intention distorted by a range of forces that exceed conscious control. George Eliot's radicalism is caught in a similar trap, since every remedy seemed to her more likely to inflame than to relieve. Felix Holt thus demonstrates the limit not just of Felix's strain of political radicalism, but of every strain of radicalism—the impossibility of turning radical intentions into radical results. What remains, for Felix Holt as well as for Eliot's work more generally, is a radicalism the stakes of which are so high and the risks so acute that it can only act like conservatism.