George Eliot And The Visual Arts by Hugh Witemeyer (review)

BOOK REVIEWS319 American Civil War. "The Two Generals" of another story are brothers from Kentucky , in their twenties, on opposite sides in the Civil War, and in love with thé same girl. "Catherine Carmichael; or, Three Years Running" is a somber tale, difficult to forget. A Scotch girl, orphaned and destitute in New Zealand after her father's death, marries an unloving, middle-aged distant relative who offers her a home. Her bleak existence and her hopelessness are vividly portrayed. By contrast, "Christmas at Thompson Hall" is a great comic story dealing with a woman's accidentally applying a mustard plaster to the chest of a sleeping stranger in a hotel in Paris. Trollope's short stories often seem tales or anecdotes, less tightly constructed and less complex than a modern reader expects. Symbolism, when it appears, tends to be explicit. His understanding of his characters, however, makes reading the short stories enjoyable, and the rescue of "Catherine Carmichael" and "Christmas at Thompson Hall" from oblivion make this volume worthwile. SAMUEL C. MONSON Brigham Young University Hugh Witemeyer. George Eliot And The Visual Arts. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. 238p. George Eliot andthe Visual Arts does whatevery workofscholarshipshould do. It offers new insights; it makes sound observations based on both the primary texts and the critical tradition; and it presents these insights and observations in clear, concise, and lively language. In addition, its typography is attractive and its illustrations are fine and relevant. With references from her novels, letters, and essays, Hugh Witemeyer first demonstrates Eliot's knowledge of the visual arts and then discriminates the various pictorial modes she uses. Thus, for instance, Witemeyer identifies the Wordsworthian mode of affective description in The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, the Dutch genre painting in Scenes of Clerical Life, the conversation-piece mode in Middlemarch, and the "fancy painting" that undercuts the pretensions and posings of Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda. Witemeyer includes, unobtrusively, reference to the important critical studies, but concentrates on a careful analysis of the novels themselves. One of the marvels of his work is that it presents precisely sufficient evidence for his arguments, so that the reader is neither wearied by obvious detail nor puzzled by omissions. True, he makes a few distracting errors that more careful proofreading would have eliminated : e.g., "Charlotte" for Catherine (Arrowpoint) and a reference to Godfrey Cass's "illegitimate" daughter. And he might have strengthened one argument, at least, by developing his point more precisely. Noting that Eliot's interest in phrenology becomes less explicit in her later novels, he cites an exception in Felix Holt; he might have observed, further, that the voice there is not the narrator's, as it had been in the unironic phrenological references in Scenes and Adam Bede, but that of Felix himself, amused by his own conceit. But these are minor points. The book's importance rests in its demonstration that George Eliot's use of the visual tradition is not incidental or decorative, but integral to her novels, and that it is not limited to the Dutch and Flemish genre tradition with which Eliot is so often associated, but rather incorporates many other traditions in equally significant ways. Supplementing the thorough analysis are thirty-six black-and-white illustrations of paintings and drawings to which Witemeyer refers, some of them allusions 320ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW and influences in Eliot's novels, others, illustrations of scenes from Romola and Adam Bede. The penultimate chapter, on Frederic Leighton's illustrations for the original, serial publication of Romola, may seem at first to be extraneous, not focusing, as the other chapters do, on Eliot's use of the visual arts. But it does offer further insights into the relationship of word and picture, and especially their mutual service to a realism as complex and subtle as Eliot's. As Eliot's novels are enhanced by her use of the pictorial tradition, so the reader's appreciation and understanding of them will be enhanced by this excellent study. CAROL A. MARTIN Boise State University ...