"A Mere Victim of Feeling": Women's Tears and the Crisis of Lineage in Middlemarch

In george Eliot's Middlemarch (1872), women's tears play an underestimated but critical role in the language of flow and circulation that characterizes nineteenth-century human connectedness. Inherited traits prompt many of the novel's crises; as bodily fluids, women's tears define lineage as so indelible that, as Julia Kristeva observes, "the unbearable identity of the

Fig 1.

Frederick Walker, 'Comfort in grief ' in William Makepeace Thackeray's The Adventures of Philip on his Way Through the World: Shewing Who Robbed Him, Who Helped Him, and Who Passed Him By (Cornhill Magazine, 1862).

narrator … can no longer be narrated but cries out" (141; emphasis in original). Tears both circulate the shame of inherited traits and demonstrate the frustration Victorian women feel at the impossibility of escaping their bloodlines.

Tears had strong performative purchase for the Victorians, signifying a range of intense emotional responses, from hysterical overwhelm to profound grief and moral regeneration, and becoming hallmarks of sensation fiction and melodrama. In contrast to authors of these popular genres, which paired tears with heightened emotions, Eliot pursues a more scientific interest in these bodily fluids as they manifest each person's history of inherited traits. Her use of tears in Middlemarch also draws on their rich literary history, as tears register tragic self-awareness in Shakespeare, illustrate "penitential weeping" in Herbert, and "communicate forgiveness" in Blake (Lafford 118). Tom Lutz, in his cultural history of tears, begins by observing "the association of tears with renewal" (3), and critics writing about Eliot's efforts to foster a sympathetic response are quick to see tearful scenes in her novels as diffusing compassion as well as self-awareness.¹

Endorsing Adam Smith's theory that human sympathy depends on the imaginative extension of self, Eliot uses tears to dramatize the development of social consciousness.² Both protagonist Dorothea Brooke and her foil, Rosamond Vincy, struggle against the claims of their bloodlines, though with differing outcomes. As "the flower of Middlemarch" (253), Rosamond experiences distress at the incongruity between her personal narrative of conquest and her family's vulgar bloodline and rank. Convinced "that she might have been happier if she had not been the daughter of a Middlemarch manufacturer," Rosamond resents any reminder "that her mother's father had been an innkeeper" (107). Her father unwittingly contributes to Rosamond's discontent; while he clearly hopes to improve his family's status by educating Fred and Rosamond, Mr. Vincy is regarded to have "descended a little" in his marriage (103). Able "to discern very subtly the very faintest aroma of rank," Rosamond aspires to a higher social sphere because "what is the use of being exquisite unless you are seen by the best judges?" (353). Once ambition leads her to fasten on Lydgate, she quickly formulates an escape narrative and soon imagines "the costumes and introductions of her married life, having determined on her house in Middlemarch, and foreseen the visits she would pay to her husband's high-born relatives" (120).

Lydgate disrupts this pleasant success story by deliberately avoiding the Vincy household. When he calls after a long absence, Rosamond gives way to tears and becomes "as natural as she had ever been when she was five years old: she felt that her tears had risen and it was no use to try to do anything else than let them stay like water on a blue flower or let them fall over her cheeks" (259). Although Eliot describes this as "a moment of naturalness," Rosamond's visualizes her tears as "water on a blue flower," imagining how she will appear to Lydgate's more cultivated aesthetic taste. Her decision to let him observe her tears is both natural and theatrical—while she performs her distress to test Lydgate's response, Rosamond's tears arise from a fear that her vulgar lineage has repelled Lydgate, who is "better born than most country surgeons" (144). As Rae Greiner notes, Rosamond "is narrator-like in not quite having a 'self,' in...