George Eliot: Whole Soul

George Eliot: Whole Soul is a formidable intellectual and spiritual biography. It achieves a detailed representation of the author’s life through sustained and careful analysis of her novels, poetry, and nonfictional writings. Blumberg documents the interrelated trajectories of Eliot’s private and public lives, revealing her painstaking attempts to both develop and live up to her ambitious philosophical principles. And perhaps most significantly, Blumberg pays careful attention to the resurfacing of attachments from the devout Christianity of Eliot’s youth as and when they manifest in her adult life and mature work. This, in short, is the contribution that Blumberg has made with this book to biographical studies of George Eliot: the detailed anatomization of her investment in religious forms across all of her intellectual endeavors, both before and after her famous break with orthodox Christianity.To this extent, George Eliot: Whole Soul contributes to the growing body of work that challenges the common scholarly assumption of the straightforwardness of Eliot’s agnostic secular humanism. In the vein of scholars like Marilynn Orr, Blumberg is interested in resisting the tendency to assimilate her complex agnosticism to an idea of secularism understood as the epistemologically neutral territory remaining after religious belief has been lost. Referencing Barbara Hardy’s passing description of Eliot’s “secular morality,” Blumberg points out “the tendency among scholars to assume that such a description points to a clearly understood body of beliefs and ideas” (xi). This tendency could be described as a literary version of what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “subtraction story” of secularization, or the idea that the secular is a self-evident paradigm defined only as what remains “once religious and metaphysical beliefs fall away” (Taylor 253). By taking Eliot’s “secular morality” as a known quantity not in need of further analysis of its relationship to Eliot’s time as an observant Christian, this scholarly tendency closes off key points of understanding in the relationship between orthodox Christianity and modern Western philosophical and intellectual paradigms, both within the biography and oeuvre of George Eliot and in general scholarship on the subject. Such obfuscation impairs our ability to accurately understand the Victorian period, and therefore, ultimately, our own present.In responding to this tendency, Blumberg’s text provides insightful attention to both the period of George Eliot’s life in which she was an observant Christian and the ways in which the experience of religious faith continually informed her intellectual and philosophical preoccupations throughout her life as an avowed agnostic. Through her thoughtful analysis of key events in Eliot’s life in tandem with her writings, Blumberg demonstrates that her literary works and her personal choices alike were experiments in working out a postorthodox ethics that was inevitably highly influenced by the intense Christian faith that shaped her. In her narration of Eliot’s well-known decision to elope with George Henry Lewes, for example, she provides a fascinating reading of how Eliot’s attachment to the Christian concept of sacrifice shaped even this transgressive and unorthodox decision. Before eloping, Blumberg writes, Eliot “maintained silence with her closest and longest-standing female friends, the sisters Sara Hennell and Cara Bray, who surely deserved her confidence. . . . [I]t seems that Marian knew no way to incarnate a new stage of her mental and spiritual existence while maintaining continuity with the major figures of the stage she needed to end” (65). In seeking to make sense of Eliot’s strange conviction that eloping with Lewes would end her friendships with Hennell and Bray, Blumberg turns to Eliot’s “deep attachment to the Christian ideal of sacrifice . . . as a shaping force in her life and her self-narration” (67). For Eliot, “sacrificial thinking survived where creed and ritual did not”: “Marian could not construe the highest form of love without sacrifice, nor a worthy sacrifice without such love; it is hard to imagine a greater, specifically Christian inheritance than this thought structure” (68). Such attention to the persistence of Christian forms of thought in Eliot’s postorthodox life fills the significant gap in biographical work on George Eliot on this subject. Thinking about the structure of Eliot’s work cannot be complete, Blumberg demonstrates, without understanding the depth of Christianity’s formative influence on her: “Like the cleric that her first readers imagined ‘George Eliot’ to be, Mary Ann Evans became a writer as an evangelical believer. . . . Let us absorb fully the significant fact that the novelist George Eliot emerged from a young woman whose earliest associations and experiences with writing were bound up with narrating a life of faith” (7).George Eliot: Whole Soul is organized into thirteen chapters, the first three of which are concerned with her early childhood to the time of her father’s death, when she was twenty-seven years old. Blumberg notes that “Mary Anne’s early exposure to denominational difference in the context of close personal and familial relationships helped shape a capacious religious sensibility intensely focused on meeting the pressing and particular needs of individual human beings” (3). This personal attitude had its impact on her intellectual life: when recording her impressions of Christian publications, “she typically noted the denomination of the author, [but] it is clear that Mary Ann simply sought to read as widely as possible and certainly not to miss any influential or major text” (6). Arriving at Evans’s early twenties and her move with her father from Nuneaton to Coventry, Blumberg describes the development of her friendship with members of the city’s community of radical and progressive intellectuals and the cooling of her previously intense Christian belief: “This stage was characterized by her personal rejection of Christian dogma and a series of intensive projects translating texts that read Scripture critically” (17). The primary intellectual task of Eliot’s “translation period,” as Blumberg calls it, was “to find a sensibility and an idiom with which to analyze and dissect, but also to invent and explore new frameworks of meaning” (40). Chapters 4 to 6 detail her early career as a periodical journalist and the advent of her relationship with George Henry Lewes. Here Blumberg details the new challenges that Eliot faced as an independent woman once she was deprived of the relative protection of her position as her father’s housekeeper: “Leaving Christian orthodoxy as a woman, and most particularly as a single woman, exerted its own costs and challenges for self-definition” (50). Unlike someone like Harriet Martineau, whose clear investment in practical feminist reform and strong support from her progressive Unitarian family gave her a context in which to articulate her female identity in the nineteenth-century public sphere, Eliot’s particular intellectual and ethical commitments had neither a “clear political program” nor “a supportive family base” (51). As she made ends meet through the patronage and amatory friendship of the publisher John Chapman, the aesthetic and ethical commitments that would shape her higher profile as a novelist began to take shape (84). Chapters 7 through 13 detail that career as an author of fiction and poetry in both biographical and literary analytical terms, showing the rich complexity of the relationship between these spheres. Throughout these readings, Blumberg offers careful attention to the contours of Eliot’s shifting representational relationship with Christianity. In “Amos Barton,” the first story of Scenes of Clerical Life, for example, “the gospel was made flesh only when the most ordinary, common human suffering, rather than any doctrinal claim, peremptorily demanded repentance for insensibility to human love and life” (98). But “Janet’s Repentance,” she argues, “stages the belief that human sympathy is insufficient unless it leads to divine sympathy. . . . Fascinatingly, this story seems to move away from a purely humanist creed of kindness” (100). By the time of her writing of her final novel Daniel Deronda, Eliot has cultivated a disposition and authorial persona unwilling to “‘superciliously prejudge’ . . . any sort of faith, whether in Science or Providence”: “This is nineteenth-century agnosticism laid out before us . . . a ready admission of insufficient knowledge” (195). There is no concluding or summarizing chapter; George Eliot: Whole Soul ends with a plain description of Eliot’s death and the memorial service held in her honor. This, I think, is apt in a text revealing the life of an author who “[t]ook human mortality to be a generative consciousness and represented death as a human fate inescapable, intensely lonely, and individuating” (180).In addition to filling a gap in biographical studies of George Eliot with its thorough focus on her spiritual life and commitments, Blumberg’s extensive research and use of Eliot’s correspondence make this text an enormously useful reference for finding information in her letters concerning both biographical events and the preparation of her works for publication. Beyond the careful attention to the influence of theological concepts on Eliot’s work, a reader seeking exclusively literary or literary-theoretical arguments about the novels would not find such readings here. But the ambition and impressive volume of Blumberg’s archival research on George Eliot’s life enables her to make wide-ranging connections across her life and works that will be enormously useful to readers who take an interest not only in George Eliot specifically but in the intellectual and religious history of the British Victorian period as a whole.