George Eliot's Moral Aesthetic: Compelling Contradictions by Constance Fulmer (review)

Solidarity and continuity: these are the two concepts, Constance Fulmer writes in George Eliot's Moral Aesthetic: Compelling Contradictions, that guided Eliot's moral aesthetic, and they are the terms that operate with equal prominence in this new study of Eliot's writings. Fulmer's command of these works—including fiction, poetry, notebooks, letters, and even juvenilia—is mighty, and the equality of attention she confers to works major and minor is admirable. Above all, though, it is this book's philosophical motive, its view of Eliot as a powerful and lifelong thinker on moral subjects, that comes through in the range of texts called upon by Fulmer to illustrate the endurance of Eliot's two abiding principles. While hardly the first monograph devoted to Eliot's morality, Fulmer's differs sharply from earlier works such as Bernard Paris's Experiments in Life: George Eliot's Quest for Values (1965) or Suzanne Graver's George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (1984). What distinguishes Fulmer's project is her sense of what she calls the "compelling contradiction" between Eliot's high moral commitments (not only as expressed in her characters, but also in her own life) and her creativity as an artist. Ultimately, Fulmer's Eliot is a novelist for whom the determining moral principles of her fiction—solidarity and continuity—are borne out of the experience of vocation she herself felt as a young woman: a vocation not simply to create but also to produce art of high importance and transformative potential in her culture. Responding herself to the call of continuity—an inheritance of undeniable artistic ability, human insight, and otherness—Eliot and her works, according to Fulmer, take as their imperative the truth of solidarity, that imperative of fellow-feeling expressed to readers' minds and bodies through a panoply of aesthetic gestures, scenarios, and details. Fulmer's book is structured by these identifiable and recurring elements that either echo the experience of continuity Eliot reckoned with herself as a writer by vocation, or that communicate the requirements of solidarity.

Fulmer's determining focus on solidarity and continuity is itself representative of the depth and detail of her scholarship. In her introduction, she notes the near obscurity of the two documents from which she sources these guiding terms: a notebook titled "Historic Guidance" quoted by Thomas Pinney in his 1966 article, "More Leaves from George Eliot's Notebook," and Eliot's "Notes on the Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in General," first published by John Cross in 1908. It will be helpful to quote from the former (which Fulmer helpfully includes in the appendix) as it is truly the bedrock of this book's argument. In "Historic Guidance," Eliot writes, "Both [solidarity] & continuity become more obvious & pressing facts in proportion as social & international relations become more manifold & stringent, so that minds in which they cause no sympathetic working are obliged to own them, though it were only with anathemas against their forefathers & fellow citizens" (qtd. in Fulmer 184).

No one who has read and thought about Eliot's writing can encounter this excerpt without feeling its resonance across the entire board of her work. Fulmer's process is to map these resonances. Beginning with an account of Eliot's development as a writer, reading many of her letters as a young woman as presages of her vocation and practice of her art, the book moves on to consider the character Fulmer argues is most reflective of Eliot's own experience and oft neglected by critics: Fedalma of The Spanish Gypsy (1878). Fulmer's reading of Fedalma and her inheritance of leadership, art, and duty to otherness serves not only as a strong argument for the premise of the book but also as a welcome reminder of the discursive relationship between Eliot's poetry and prose. Further chapters are structured around recurring themes, motifs, and situations: I found "Contrasting Pairs, Mirrors, and Windows...