Invisible Thoroughfares

In the light of recent criticism on Victorian literature and psychology, Michael Davis's subtitle seems somewhat ironic: critics such as Sally Shuttleworth, Jenny Bourne Taylor, and, most importantly for this study, Rick Rylance, in Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford University Press, 2000) have devoted considerable energy to mapping the emergence of a new discourse of psychology in the nineteenth century and its implications for literature. Davis, perhaps wisely, rarely attempts to take on these authorities and does not differ from them on any major points. Rather than present a cultural history of Victorian psychology he narrows the focus to George Eliot's interaction with several of the leading writers on psychological questions of her day, many of whom were her friends or acquaintances – Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Bain, and of course G. H. Lewes. Through detailed close readings of the language of her novels, interspersed with accounts of how this language engages with varied scientific contexts, Davis seeks to convey a sense of Eliot's investment in the human mind and its 'fluid dynamic relations' (p. 7) to the physical body, emotion, will, and spirituality. His central concern is to investigate 'the balance of separateness and connection' (p. 190) in Eliot's fiction, the way in which the mind is both subjective, alienated from the outside world, and fundamentally shaped by it. As he repeatedly emphasises, this tension has significant implications for Eliot's ethical vision, since it calls into question the notion that sympathetic connections between individuals are possible.

The specificity of George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology is both its greatest strength and its most evident weakness. Although Eliot remains the subject of a large body of criticism, there have actually been relatively few monographs devoted to her alone in recent years, and it is a pleasure to see such close attention being paid to the language of her novels. Davis's ability to trace patterns of imagery through her novels and the scientific texts she absorbed constantly throws up new connections. In chapter 4, 'The Will, Consciousness, the Unconscious', to take one example, he notes E. S. Dallas's use of an image of an electric 'flash' to signify the power of unconscious memory, and follows this with the 'flash of strange light' which Latimer experiences in 'The Lifted Veil'; Will Ladislaw's vision of the ideal poet as one for whom knowledge and feeling 'flash' together; Dorothea's experience of a feeling like an 'electric shock' when confronted with Rome; and Will's 'electric shock' on hearing of his family from Bulstrode (pp. 150–1). Here, as throughout this study, Davis persuasively draws together varying uses of the same image from different sources to show how they all contribute to Eliot's thoughtful analysis of unwilled, unconscious emotion and its relation to mind and body.

The disadvantage of this concentration on close readings of Eliot's novels in the light of key scientific texts is that Davis completely ignores the wider literary culture of the time, giving the impression that Eliot's novels existed in a literary vacuum. No other Victorian novelist or poet is mentioned even in passing. Yet surely Eliot was not solely influenced by Spencer, Lewes, et al. in her thinking about mind and body, and, even if she were, the broader cultural context in which these concepts existed is worth some discussion. It is hard to read this study and not think about, say, Empedocles' anguished meditation on mind and thought in Matthew Arnold's Empedocles on Etna, or the role of the somatic body in sensation fiction, or the pathologised relations between mind and world in Tennyson's Maud. Moreover, the focus on several canonical texts in mid-to late Victorian science barely makes a dent in the huge list of Eliot's and Lewes's reading interests, and leaves out vast areas of popular and pseudo-science. In comparison to studies such as Alison Winter's enthralling Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in...