George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country (review)

The striking cover design of Michael Davis's study, a map of the intricate network of nerves or "fibres" that transect the human body, linked by the spinal cord and leading to the brain, is taken from George Henry Lewes's Physiology of Common Life (1859–60). Combined with Davis's subtitle, it points to the paradoxes traced in this thought-provoking book. Critics have long been fascinated by George Eliot's complex engagement with her contemporary scientific culture, and this is not the first analysis of her response to the psychological debates of her time. Sally Shuttleworth explored Eliot's engagement with physiological psychology in George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science in 1984; Gillian Beer included mental science in Darwin's Plots in 1983; Nancy Paxton investigated Eliot's relationship to social, psychological, and anthropological theory in George Eliot and Herbert Spencer in 1991; and more recently, Rick Rylance's Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (2000) used Eliot as his literary focus in analysing the intellectual strands linked in the emerging field of psychology. Davis's book builds on this work, but develops a fresh perspective by focusing in detail on the intricacies of contemporary debates and stressing the ways in which Eliot questions and subverts, as much as extends, psychological discourse by weaving its many facets into a wider ethical system, while stressing the ultimate undecidablity of the mind, the complexity of human consciousness and motivation, and the challenge of representing it.

Davis develops his argument thematically, using each chapter to focus on Eliot's response to one aspect of psychological discourse across a range of novels. Attending closely to the intricacies of specific arguments, this book contributes significantly to the study of nineteenth-century psychology as well as to Eliot scholarship. Davis concentrates on the mainstream figures with whom Eliot engaged, rather than surveying the institutional and ideological implications of psychology and mental science, or more unorthodox forms such as mesmerism. This concentrated attention allows him to tease out subtle nuances that more general studies pass over. And while his thematic approach makes difficult any appreciation of the collision of psychological frameworks within particular texts, it does allow Davis to show how Eliot experimentally tested contrasting concepts of mind across texts. This study unashamedly reads Eliot as an ethicist as much as a novelist, and it questions interpretations which read her representation of the self as an organic whole as a sign of a conservative or static social vision. Instead it stresses how Eliot appropriates and reworks psychological debates to explore this "whole" self as both fluid and dynamic, interiorised, yet linked in its multifaceted elements with other subjectivities.

Each chapter raises key questions that underpinned mid-nineteenth-century psychological discourse: what is the relationship between the body and the mind? To what extent are mental states instinctive and inherited? How should emotion be understood and regarded? What is the relation between the will, consciousness, and unconscious processes? Davis unpacks the specific, and sometimes unpredictable, ways in which Eliot reworks these questions. Like most other critics, he stresses the intimate intellectual companionship of Eliot and Lewes. The opening discussion of Lewes's conception of sensation, in which the body manifests its own kind of intelligence, has ramifications throughout the study. Responding to Baruch Spinoza's arguments about the inextricability of the mind and body, Lewes insisted on the irreducibility of subjectivity. Using "Janet's Repentance" from Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) and Adam Bede (1859) as case studies, Davis shows that Eliot also responded to Spinoza, dramatising the inseparability of subjectivity from the body itself. Chapter 2 focuses on Eliot's assimilation of evolutionary notions of instinct and heredity: she extends Charles Darwin's stress on the complexity of social environment and culture as it shapes identity in Daniel Deronda (1876), and reworks Spencer's concept of memory in The Mill on the Floss (1860) to question and undercut his sense...