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An Erotics of Detachment:Middlemarch and Novel-Reading as Critical Practice David Kurnick I read promiscuously. How could it be otherwise? I had no real guide, was obliged to feel my way into light. Yet perhaps there was a guidance, although indefinite and without distinctive aim. —George Harrow, English bricklayer and trade unionist (b. 1833)1 Invariably the historical past was the tense that excited a kind of desire in her. —Edmund White, Caracole George Eliot's Middlemarch is perhaps the single most important document of the nineteenth-century English novel's aspiration to intellectual seriousness. Famously praised by Virginia Woolf in 1919 as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," Middlemarch's critical status—indeed, its status as a kind of criticism in its own right—has only increased in subsequent years.2 In Barbara Hardy's assessment, Eliot's masterwork is "the first English novel to analyse the psychology of historical consciousness," and James Buzard has more recently argued that the book embodies the "autoethnographic project of grasping an English culture in its densely integrated and self-regarding totality."3 But while Middlemarch is arguably the most perfect realization of the novel's ambition to present a historicized picture of the social whole, it is, more disturbingly, a book that seems reluctant to share these intellectual riches with its characters.4 The critical consensus as to Middlemarch's achievement is haunted by a sense that this is a distinctly punitive novel, one that purchases its intellectual and critical authority at the expense of its fictional inhabitants. J. Hillis Miller, in a representative formulation, contends that "the narrator of [Eliot's] novels claims for herself precisely that all-embracing breadth of vision . . . which is denied to the characters."5 Troublingly for an author whose highest value is the sympathetic imagination, Eliot [End Page 583] seems incapable of conceiving of characters who might be capable of conceiving of something like Middlemarch. If Dorothea Brooke is the most poignant of Eliot's failed heroines, it is perhaps because her story is on the face of it a happy one. Middlemarch may be the first great English social novel, but it is also, as Joseph Allen Boone puts it, "one of the last great marriage novels to conform to the Shakespearean dictum that 'journeys end with lovers meeting.'"6 But Dorothea's union with Will Ladislaw may be part of her problem; her romantic satisfaction, Eliot suggests, is an index of her intellectual failure. Dorothea, we are told, is possessed of a "passionate desire to know and to think," but it is precisely through her submission to the erotic that her passion loses its intellectual predicates and becomes a mere affair of the self.7 It is Woolf who makes clearest that the erotic is the ground of Dorothea's exclusion from insight when she writes of "Dorothea seeking wisdom and finding one scarcely knows what in marriage to Ladislaw."8 The comment suggests that if Dorothea can function as the narrative focal point of Middlemarch's socio-historical understanding, she cannot be the bearer of that understanding—and more particularly that this inability is tied to her willingness to forsake her intellectual ambitions in return for a satisfied sexual desire. Woolf's offhand remark gets at the heart of what concerns me in this essay, the fraught relationship between novelistic eroticism and social understanding. I have turned to Middlemarch to examine those relations because the novel's treatment of its desiring heroine seems to exemplify George Levine's recent claim that the refusal of desire is central to nineteenth-century narratives of scientific validity.9 If Eliot is the most prominent English novelist to stake fiction's claim to status as a kind of historical sociology, this claim, we will see, appears founded on an abjecting of the desiring Dorothea. This essay interrogates the grounds on which that abjection occurs, in order both to reconceptualize the role desire plays in Middlemarch and to re-open the question of what critical capacities may be exercised in the practice of novel-reading itself. My contention is that the relations between character and narrator may only tell us a limited...
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