Birthing Fiction

Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, “Birthing Fiction: Pregnancy and Nascent Realism in George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life” (pp. 213–236) This analysis of George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) contributes to the recent surge of scholarship on pregnancy and its representation in nineteenth-century literature and culture. It argues that Eliot made pregnancy perceptible through contemporary literary strategies such as pregnancy calendaring (that is, dense time marking that enabled readers to track a character’s pregnancy), allusions to behaviors and care treatments advocated for pregnant women in medical advice manuals, and poignant metonyms of pregnancy and miscarriage such as babies’ caps and layette pincushions. However, Eliot suggests that not all characters—and not all readers—will perceive or respond to the text’s subtle indicators of pregnancy. Instead, the capacity to notice and respond to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or their possibilities with compassion and sympathy functions in her early realist fiction as an ethical test. In “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” and “Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story,” the acts of perceiving and responding ethically to pregnancy (or its possibility) thus emerge as linchpins of Eliot’s developing realist and humanist fiction.