The Quest for Anonymity: The Novels of George Eliot (review)

Many of George Eliot’s contemporaries considered her a moral teacher first and a novelist second, and Henry Alley’s brief study of George Eliot revives that tradition. Alley regards “anonymous heroism” as the central theme in Eliot’s fiction and he offers a chronological reading of her major works, showing how the idea is developed and refined throughout her novels.

Anonymous heroism, as Alley defines it, is Eliot’s challenge to conventional notions of heroism. Her novels demonstrate that “true” heroes or heroines are those whose good acts do not bring them prestige or even acknowledgment. The representation of anonymous heroism entails, then, a “paradoxical perspective” “of recognizing what goes without recognition” (15). Consequently, Eliot typically includes a “witnessing” figure in her narratives, a character educated in the course of the novel to recognize unacknowledged heroism. In acquiring this discernment, the witness is celebrated by the narrative, and becomes a model for the reader, who also learns to embrace anonymity by engaging with the novels.

A second major concern of Alley’s book is to demonstrate that Eliot’s frequent use of allusions to the “greats,” heroic figures from other texts (particularly those seen in Greek tragedy, but also in Shakespeare and Milton, among others), is an important strategy in her affirmation of anonymous heroism. The references work in a variety of ways, from serving as models for true heroism (Prometheus, Antigone), to deflating the fame of past heroes. Well into the study, it becomes apparent that Alley has a third central aim, which is to demonstrate that anonymous heroism is achieved by a blending of male and female attributes, so that the true heroic figure is androgynous. This gender sub-theme becomes an increasingly prominent feature of the book’s argument, as Alley sees androgyny becoming a more recognized feature of Eliot’s depiction of anonymous heroism in her middle to late fiction.

Alley places his study in the tradition of criticism that has read Eliot on “broadly defined moral and esthetic foundations” (23). Eliot challenges “the concept of single- minded achievement,” Alley argues, and he himself takes the lesson of anonymous heroism seriously, seeing his own study as a product of shared scholarship, “acknowledging both ‘post-modernism’ and what comes before” (22). The frequent allusions to other critics, however, sometimes seem unnecessary, and in practice his method and concerns are largely pre-theoretical.

The book’s central critical dispute is with some recent feminist criticism. Alley wants to rescue Eliot from assertions of anti-feminism, which are based on her tendency to leave her heroines in self-sacrificing positions. He claims that selflessness does not reflect Eliot’s acquiescence in Victorian views on women’s submissive roles, but instead represents a tempering of egoism that Eliot regards as crucial for both genders. Indeed, the demands that some feminist critics have made for her heroines, Alley argues, derive in Eliot’s view from a misguided male “code of prestige” (134). In this reading, then, Dorothea ends up not in a circumscribed and compromised life, but instead as the finest of Eliot’s anonymous heroines, while Gwendolen, being altogether absent at the end of her novel, is representative of unnamed heroism, and so “receives the greater glory” (153).

There is a lot to be said for attempting to reconstruct what Eliot thought she was up to. Still, Alley’s recasting of the gender questions leaves significant unresolved problems. He acknowledges some of the counter-arguments—androgyny, for example, is not to be seen as a misguided attempt to achieve disinterestedness, as some recent feminist critics have argued, but rather as a method to counter “single-minded bias” (99). I find it hard to accept that Eliot called for a fusion of genders given, for instance, her seeming approbation of Auguste Comte’s views on the worship of women. (In general, the book would be strengthened by more frequent reference to Eliot’s intellectual influences outside of the heroic allusions that...