Spirit Becomes Matter: The Brontës, George Eliot, Nietzsche by Henry Staten (review)

Spirit Becomes Matter: The Brontës, George Eliot, Nietzsche, studies Jane Eyre (1847), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Wuthering Heights (1847), refers also to The Professor (1857), Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), and Romola (1862–63), frequently references Friedrich Nietzsche, and comes from Henry Staten, originally a Victorianist and an author well-known for his work on critical theory and philosophy—including Nietzsche and Jaques Derrida. After the introduction, the book divides into two: the Brontës at first and last, and two intervening chapters on Middlemarch. The first chapter on Eliot gives a useful account of the politics assumed in the book, and another long chapter provides a thoroughly traditional account of Wuthering Heights—a novel which stirs up more critical passions than were ever experienced on the moors—aimed at demythologizing Heathcliff. In its dismissal of those with whom it disagrees, it reads somewhat dogmatically—Staten prefers to say, with “meticulous detail”—but there is little critical theory in it (133). It is conservative down to its attack on so-called Left critics, including Terry Eagleton and Arnold Kettle, and, to a lesser extent, Raymond Williams (I could not help wondering how that conservatism worked in relation to the author’s interest in Derrida). Nietzsche is implicit, but hardly invoked, save possibly in the sense of a higher necessary tolerance of cruelty in the countryside of the novel. Nietzsche is indeed fairly peripheral to the first Middlemarch essay, but that itself differs from another Middlemarch chapter, where he underlies an account of Dorothea Brooke; Nietzsche also informs the introduction, which discusses in Charlotte and Emily Brontë and Eliot the development of a Victorian materialist “critical moral psychology” (3). Nietzsche appears also in the Jane Eyre chapter; here Staten’s fascination—repeated in the book’s conclusion—lies with St. John Rivers, a character about whom he has some thoughtful things to say.

Staten assumes that Nietzsche’s “will to power” should be taken negatively: he asserts this by autociting, but not reviewing, his previously published work and without glossing it (27). He also disagrees with William Myers’s Nietzschean readings of Eliot, but does not expand Myers’s interpretation. But “will to power” is trickier than a will to dominate or control. Definitive readings of it that Staten should have cited, but does not, can be found in Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962)—where it is entirely positive, as that which moves toward greater life—and Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969), which sees will to power as a conflictual impersonal movement directed toward overcoming single identity, which is an unacceptable imposition on the body’s conflicting intensities—an idea which it would be fascinating to explore in relation to the novels discussed here. Staten’s “will to power” makes Jane Eyre and Dorothea Brooke figures with a fair share of destructiveness; Dorothea “has to destroy Casaubon, and does in fact destroy him” (102). This is because she is an ascetic and ascetics, like Rivers, work through dominance. Staten calls Rivers an ascetic priest, following the terminology of The Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay (1887), and however unexceptionable this account, it simplifies the point that an “ascetic priest” associates with a will to truth which maintains the truth/fiction of single identity (14). Staten might profitably have offered an entire chapter on Nietzsche, instead of the off-the-cuff allusions to him now and then, which, in any case, sit problematically (though not impossibly) with these novelists. Nietzsche was hostile to the idea of morality as anything other than bourgeois ideology; he viewed it as indelibly stained by the residues of a Christianity that he saw Eliot as not having sloughed off despite her intellectual convictions.

Staten’s approach to Jane Eyre lacks attention to its feminism, which makes a woman’s struggle with Christian belief different from a man’s; there is virtually no attention to Bertha Mason (apart...