How a ‘free bond of love’ helped George Eliot escape the marriage trap
Eliot told a friend that George Henry Lewes was ‘unsensual’ in their relationship
THE MARRIAGE QUESTION: GEORGE ELIOT’S DOUBLE LIFE by Clare Carlisle 400pp, Allen Lane T£19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£25, ebook £12.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
“A great leap into the open-endedness of another human being” is the striking image Clare Carlisle uses to describe marriage at the opening of her perceptive and suggestive book. Throughout European fiction of the 19th century – Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler – the risk of catastrophe following that leap is a persistent theme, in which badly matched women become imprisoned victims of an institution that legally restricts their rights and threatens social scandal if they betray its code.
In English literature, it is George Eliot who explores “the marriage question” in most searching depth. Her own life, notoriously, was implicated in the debate: she lived outside wedlock for a quarter of a century with George Henry Lewes, whose wife had abandoned him for another man. Although all parties were happy with the situation, and Eliot’s fame and status as a sage allowed her to transcend public excoriation, she would remain cautiously in the shadows until after Lewes’s death when she was married in church to John Cross, an American 20 years her junior.
Her relationship to Lewes was something she regarded as “a sacred union”, sanctioned by an assertion in Ludwig Feuerbach’s treatise The Essence of Christianity (which, as a young woman, she had translated from the German) that marriage was something based in a “free bond of love” rather than a blessing conferred by a priest. There was nothing “open” or provisional about her ménage, however. Rigorously identifying herself outside her writings as “Mrs Lewes” (rather than Mary Ann Evans, the name she was christened with), Eliot can sound sanctimonious in her pronouncements about monogamy and her condemnation of “light and easily broken ties”.
She made her choice, and fortunately her leap proved a very successful one – Lewes may have been “tactless, vain and a little vulgar” (as a contemporary called him), but he also made an unfailingly loyal, kindly, protective and cheerful partner, who negotiated Eliot’s depressions sensitively and whose tastes and interests she shared. His successor, Cross, positively worshipped her.
Yet throughout her fiction, Eliot imagined a series of marriages that don’t work. Carlisle notes that the early short story “Janet’s Repentance” shows “with unprecedented realism how the law sanctioned marital violence instead of protecting abused wives”; the eponymous heroine of
Romola and Dorothea Brooke in
Middlemarch both sacrifice themselves to men in whose moral fibre they are deceived; while Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda naively believes that marrying the wealthy brute Henleigh Grandcourt will allow her material freedom and happiness. And it’s not always wives whose spirits are crushed by their husbands: Middlemarch’s idealistic doctor Tertius Lydgate finds himself ruined by the demands of pathetically shallow Rosamond Vincy.
Carlisle, herself an academic philosopher rather than a literary critic, vividly shows how abstract ideas current in Victorian society become incarnate in these dramatic situations. She emphasises the astonishing range of Eliot’s erudition and traces, in particular, her alignment with a trajectory that leads from Goethe to Hegel, Comte and Darwin – all in their different ways exponents of a hopeful vision of growth and development for the human race that could supersede a more rigid Christian theology of earthly sin and heavenly redemption.
More ambivalent was Eliot’s attitude to the nascent shoots of feminism. She donated £50 towards the establishment of Girton College, and given her experience as an editor of the
Westminster Review, she knew she was intellectually equal, if not superior, to any male in her circle.
Marriage material: Eliot lived outside wedlock for a quarter of a century
But she drew back from her friend Barbara Bodichon’s campaigns for legal reforms and extensions of the suffrage, and in some respects her view of a woman’s place in the world remained deeply conservative. They should serve dutifully as nurturers, wives and mothers, she thought, championing “that exquisite type of gentleness, tenderness… suffusing a woman’s being with affectionateness, which makes what we mean by the feminine character”. Images of the Madonna and child moved her profoundly; she made great efforts to be a good stepmother to Lewes’s troublesome sons.
Carlisle doesn’t berate her for this, preferring to dwell on her “feminising” of philosophy, a profession previously dominated by unmarried men. Eliot’s achievement was “to think feelingly and to feel thoughtfully” through the medium of fiction – something that would be emulated by Iris Murdoch a century later. “She searched for truths not in order to form crisp definitions or moral judgments, but to make space for the soul to grow, to stay curious, to feel alive.”
Countless biographical studies of Eliot have appeared over the last 50 years, and this one doesn’t add any facts or documents to existing accounts. There are broader issues it doesn’t address, and it’s frustrating that, on the grounds that “we know almost nothing about it”, Carlisle refuses to speculate as to whether Eliot physically consummated her love for either of her husbands. This surely isn’t a prurient or irrelevant question in such a context, and it’s perfectly possible that she didn’t – there is evidence that she told a close friend that Lewes was “unsensual” in their “intimate marital relationship”, whatever that might mean; and Cross, 20 years her junior, is often thought to have been homosexual (quite why he attempted suicide weeks after his wedding to Eliot is another mystery).
There are other minor irritants – such as the feeble illustrations, which are mostly borrowed from cheap Victorian editions of the novels. Yet Carlisle has produced a richly considered study that brings one close to the heart and mind of a great writer and a wise soul.