George Eliot and Wagner: A Complex Reaction

Abstract While recent critics have viewed Eliot’s reaction to Wagner negatively from an evolutionary perspective, this article addresses the points of contention concerning Eliot’s views on Wagnerian music drama as well as her conception of opera in general and fleshes out the complexities of Wagner’s organicist impact on Eliot via the writings of Franz Liszt, a major champion of the composer’s early works. Drawing on the nuanced differences between Liszt’s essays on Wagner and nineteenth-century opera and Eliot’s half translation, half rewriting of Liszt’s critiques in her nonfiction prose, this article argrues that Eliot perceives in Wagner’s myth-based work an authentic quest for the truth of feeling as well as an effective contrastive mode of human drama, while generally maintaining a conflicted attitude toward Wagner the composer and Wagner the dramatist rather than remaining implicitly critical of his music as a whole out of moral-aesthetic concerns. In all, for Eliot, Wagnerian opera exemplifies amoral mythmaking with sympathetic passion at its heart and represents a postliberal affirmation of conflictual modern humanity.