Constructing Fictions of Authorship in George Eliot's Middlemarch, 1871-1872

As Nina Auerbach has recently remarked, "Middlemarch [is] a novel that, as I read it, promotes nothing" (355). Eliot's disinterestedness in this historical novel, however, is uneven, a point registered in a number of recent studies. Because my interest here lies in historicizing authorship and authorial practice, I am struck by Eliot's concern to promote (and idealize) authorship while shielding herself from the often crass promotional efforts that successful authorship inevitably entailed, including those undertaken by George Henry Lewes on behalf of Middlemarch itself.¹ This exception to Eliot's disinterestedness, I suggest, is related to another: Eliot's forceful but largely unsympathetic portrayal of Rosamond Vincy in a novel premised on sympathy. To demonstrate the link between the novel's ideology of authorship and Eliot's inconsistent aesthetics, I argue that Rosamond functions as a trope of the literary marketplace, a point made clearer in a brief analysis of the novel's representation of authorship and scrutiny of its advertising campaign, in which periodicals and serialization played a central role.

To approach Middlemarch through the lens of authorship is to become aware of how pervasive the production of texts is in this novel of social change and troubled marriage; Casaubon's pathetically thwarted authorship is the most obvious instance, but Tertius Lydgate, Fred Vincy, Mary Garth Vincy, Rev. Farebrother, Dr. Sprague, and even St. Theresa are introduced as authors. Among them, producing texts is generally a gauge of success or failure, a pattern that tacitly ascribes ethical value and authority to the practice of authorship. Through Casaubon's failure to produce manuscript pages, for example, Eliot can argue that authorship divorced from high moral purpose or passionate commitment (as well as great intellect [137] and reading of current books) is doomed. Lydgate pursues authorship for all the right reasons: "'What I want, Rosy, is to do worthy the writing, – and to write out myself what I have done'" (301– 2).² His story, in contrast to Casaubon's, enacts the dangers posed by materialist – specifically capitalist – pressure on authorship, though of course social factions, inadequate self-discipline, and small-minded notions of womanhood and masculine honor are factors as well. The unsympathetic Rosamond never cares about Lydgate's authorial aims as disinterested ends but only as means to social status. Rather than endure the stringent economy (and reduced circumstances) that would ensure his intellectual independence and research leading to "worthy [...] writing," she rejects Lydgate's attempts at economy and positions herself, with some basis, as his victim. With such a helpmeet beside him, Lydgate's sole act of authorship, the gout treatise, thus inscribes his enslavement to capitalism and his inability to retain a "life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it" (509).

Eliot told John Cross that of all her characters, "Rosamond [was] the most difficult to sustain" (Cross 3:306), though the end result was forceful. After she completed Book 6, her publisher John Blackwood responded in July 1872, "Lydgate has very great merit in not taking a stick to Rosamond. You have painted that heartless [...] obstinate devil with a vengeance. It is a most highly polished picture, painted on the hardest possible bit of panel" (5:293). As Andrew Lang tartly observed two decades later, "Some [novelists] are ruthless to their characters, while some are tolerant and forgiving. Among the ruthless is George Eliot. She quite persecutes Rosamond, who, we feel sure, had something good in her, somewhere" (Lang 683–84; see also Green 12–13). Here Lang criticizes Eliot by wittily adopting towards Rosamond Eliot's customary stance of sympathy in the novel. Indeed, whereas Eliot typically takes great care to construct the inner lives of highly individualized characters – even of so unworthy a character as Bulstrode – she generalizes where Rosamond is concerned. To take just one example, when Dorothea unexpectedly discovers Rosamond and Will together in Lydgate's house, the narrator declines to delve into the web of forces underlying Rosamond's action and regards Rosamond among a general mass of superficial minds: "Shallow natures dream of an easy sway...