Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot (review)

Victorian authors had diverse and complicated relationships to the British empire. Like other Britons at home, they were involved and implicated in colonialism, without being ideological advocates for all of its goals. Charles Dickens, George Eliot, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, for example, had strong familial ties to India and the colonies. They and their contemporaries were sometimes indifferent to, sometimes critical of, the colonization of other places and subjection of other peoples. These complexities are reflected in their writing, but have been overlooked by critics committed to what Alicia Carroll calls the "stereotype of the British novelist as a wholeheartedly committed participant in the national project of empire" (xvi).

Carroll's Dark Smiles is a welcome case study of race, desire, and empire in Eliot's writing and a challenge to trends in postcolonial criticism. Carroll observes that postcolonial readings of the novelist have engaged either in celebrating her work as "progressive and enlightened" or in "chiding the same as essentially reifying a colonizing, hegemonic authority" (3). Carroll wants to take a middle ground between praise and blame by analyzing the complexion of race and desire in the author's writing. She argues that dark figures in Eliot's fiction "elide those margins to the right and left of the centers of hegemonic colonialist discourses" (3), accepting the notion of "hegemonic colonialist discourses," but attempting to show that Eliot's fiction does not participate uncritically in them. She uses Eliot to challenge the "monolithic clarity of vision" (11) that characterizes the work of critics such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. As Carroll reads them, Eliot's dark characters demonstrate that not all Victorian fiction is "unreflectingly supportive of the values of empire" (20).

The values of empire include the construction of white Englishness in opposition to dark "Otherness." According to Carroll, Eliot's dark characters challenge the image of a pure white English homeland, as well as "stereotypes of white innocence and dark desire" (xvi). This is a large claim to make about individual characters in individual works, but Carroll sees them as central to Eliot's exploration of sexual desire in provincial English society. Working around the constraints of Victorian modesty, Eliot introduced the erotic through "allusions to or representations of the Gypsy, Jew, 'Oriental,' or African" (1). Her fiction, poetry, and essays are populated by a series of "eroticized Others," including Maggie Tulliver, Harold Transome, Will Ladislaw, and Daniel Deronda. Maggie the Gypsy, Harold the Oriental, and Will the Jew demonstrate the power of metaphor and rumor to dislodge apparently stable racial categories, for Maggie is not a Gypsy (only like one); Harold is not an Oriental (he merely acquires Oriental habits), and Will is not a Jew (only rumored to be one). Their fluid, ambiguous identities disrupt their respective fictional communities. In critical terms, their very presence in the texts deconstructs binary oppositions such as domestic and foreign; colonizer and colonized; self and other.

Carroll concludes that these characters make Eliot's writing subversive, especially because their exoticness has sexual associations: "Pleasure, it seems, needs to 'infiltrate' the plots of English provincial life through Otherness" (138). This penetrating erotic darkness is authorized by other English texts, and Dark Smiles examines Eliot's dialogue with works of literature and visual art, including Lord Byron's poetry, Julia Margaret Cameron's photography, Henriette Browne's painting, and E. W. Lane's translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1839-41).

Carroll has done a fine job of showing that Eliot's England is not isolated, stable, and idyllic. She is particularly good on Felix Holt (1866) in which she shows Harold, with his Greek slave wife and half-wild son, to be "a radical critique of the Western construct of Orientalism" (65). She also devotes well-deserved time to the often-neglected poem, "The Spanish Gypsy" (1868). And she finds that in the rumor of Will Ladislaw's Jewishness, the "'fact' of ethnicity is critiqued as a potentially unstable...