George Eliot's Felix Holt and the "Mass Experience" of Energy

Abstract: Often read as a political or industrial novel, George Eliot's Felix Holt (1866) appears as a peculiar historical novel when its incorporation of energy discourse is considered. The novel elucidates how the expansion of industrial development mediates what Georg Lukács refers to as the "mass experience of history" (25) as it coincides with a particular form of energy: fossil fuels. However, despite energy's functioning as a master concept related to productivity and calculability by 1866, readers encounter varying connotations of nineteenth-century energy discourse within the novel, understood across residual moral, spiritual, and dominant thermodynamic registers. Thus, the near-historical framework of the plot in the 1830s reminds readers that a thermodynamic and fossil capitalist understanding of energy derives from a much richer history of moral, political, and philosophical discourses. In other words, for Eliot, the figurative and literary dimensions of energy cannot be fully cast aside. The figurative dimensions of the energy concept appear variously in relation to characters—from Felix Holt to Harold Transome to Esther Lyon—and to the uncontrollable masses during the infamous riot scene. Ultimately, in the bifurcation between the 1830s and the 1860s, an attentiveness to the varying deployment of energy discourse in Felix Holt challenges a sense of inevitability associated with the rise of fossil capitalism. Eliot's novel not only meditates on the relation between novelistic protagonicity and the masses but also implies that the hegemony of a fossil economy was historically contingent.