George Eliot U.S.: Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Perspectives (review)

The title of Monika Mueller's book might lead the reader to expect a history of the reception of George Eliot's work in the United States, or an analysis of her participation in nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary exchanges. Mueller's intentions seem closer to the latter: "George Eliot U.S. traces the impact that American writers have had on George Eliot's work as well as the reflection of Eliot's writing in American literature and compares British and American reactions to gendered, cultural, and racial alterity" (20). In fact, however, the book is largely a thematic comparison of three of Eliot's novels— Adam Bede (1859), Romola (1863), and Daniel Deronda (1876)—and works by three nineteenth-century American writers with whom Eliot was familiar—Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Each of Mueller's chapters pairs one form of "alterity" with the work of Eliot's that seems most obviously to address it. The first chapter focuses on gender, analyzing Adam Bede as a reworking of the sexually transgressive Hester Prynne in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) that also incorporates the speculations of Fuller and Stowe on the nature (or construction) of women. Mueller concludes that Eliot "does not follow Hawthorne in his bold future-oriented deconstruction of gender presented in The Scarlet Letter" but "align[s] herself with Fuller's and Stowe's gender perspectives, which are rather tame by comparison" (73). The second part of the chapter compares the representations of community in Middlemarch (1871–72) and Stowe's Oldtown Folks (1869), concluding that while Eliot in Middlemarch "presents a sterile and ossified Anglicanism that cannot be revitalized by young female religious enthusiasts like Dorothea," Stowe "envisions a bright future for a reformed [feminized] Calvinism in the Oldtown community" (104).

Although Mueller's comparisons engage a range of texts and invoke a variety of vectors of national difference (such as religion), such conclusions flatten rather than highlight contrasts among the authors. The ambivalence toward the position of women of the reformist Christian Stowe, the radical transcendentalist Fuller, and the ethical humanist Eliot can hardly be summed up—either singly or together—as "tame"; and a "deconstruction of gender" is not a central concern of The Scarlet Letter or of Hawthorne's work in general. If Mueller hopes that "an investigation of the American writers' approaches towards gender" will "shed additional light on Eliot's gender conception in Adam Bede and her later novels" (65), it is disappointing to have that investigation conclude in a familiar cul-de-sac: Eliot failed to "offer any positive solutions whatsoever to the gender conundrum" (88).

In the second chapter, difference takes the form of national origin, as Mueller compares her authors' representations of Italy, particularly in Romola and The Marble Faun (1860). Here Mueller's juxtapositions lead to an engaging analysis of the difficulties of representing the foreign other. She suggests, for example, that "Eliot might have shied away from dealing with [contemporary] Italianness in Romola because she was taken aback by Hawthorne's inadequate and ultimately xenophobic rendering of Italian culture in The Marble Faun" (128). But in this chapter, as in the previous one, Mueller seems to find her subject unsympathetic: "Even though Eliot avoided some of the pitfalls that Hawthorne succumbed to in his portrayal of Italy, her Italy...functions neither as a contact zone where 'cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other' according to [Mary Louise] Pratt's definition nor as a 'Third Space of enunciation' that would enable new cultural readings in Homi Bhabha's sense" (150). It is possible to agree with Mueller that Romola's Italy "is a 'cultural wasteland' and a museum at the same time" (150) and yet reject the twenty-first-century critical imperialism that castigates the nineteenth-century author of a novel set in fifteenth-century Italy for failing to anticipate the ethical requirements of twentieth-century cultural theorists.

Mueller's...