JEFFREY BERMAN
Professor of English State University of New York at Albany
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of "The Pattern of the Myth of Narcissus in Daniel Deronda” appeared in University of Hartford Studies in Literature 19 (1987): 45-60.
An earlier version of "Narcissistic Rage in The Mill on the Floss” appeared in Literature and Psychology 36 (1990): 90-109.
Earlier versions of "Self-Disorder and Aggression in Adam Bede” and "Loss, Anxiety, and Cure: Mourning and Creativity in Silas Marner” appeared in Mosaic 22 (1989): 59-70 and 25 (1992): 35–47 respectively.
I would like to thank the editors, Charles L. Ross, formerly of Hartford Studies, Morton Kaplan of Literature and Psychology, and Evelyn J. Hinz of Mosaic, for their help during the publication process.
I also want to thank Arthur Collins for guiding my independent study of George Eliot and Jeffrey Berman for guiding my independent study of literature and psychoanalysis during my doctoral student days at SUNY at Albany nearly a decade ago.
Finally, I want to thank Douglas Johnstone and Jeffrey Berman for so willingly reading my manuscript prior to publication. I made good use of their suggestions during my final revisions. I am also grateful to the editorial staff at New York University Press for their assistance during the book publication process.
Introduction
George Eliot’s fiction synthesizes the intellectual currents of the nineteenth century. As a lifelong zealous reader and self-directed student, Eliot gained not only a rich background in literature and history, religion and philosophy, art, music, and languages (German, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and Latin), but throughout her life she kept up with the latest developments in the sciences, including the emerging social sciences of psychology and sociology. Her partner, George Henry Lewes, was also famous in his own right for his substantial writings on a wide variety of subjects, including literature, philosophy, biology, and psychology. Among the eminent names in their shared milieu were Herbert Spencer, the philosopher perhaps best remembered for his "Social Darwinism," Alexander Bain, the British Associationist psychologist, and Charles Darwin, the naturalist whose theories Lewes studied closely and with whom he corresponded on occasion. Much of the literary criticism on George Eliot has illuminated the influences of such contemporaries on her art. Her fiction writing, however, is far more than a synthesis of the thinking of other intellectuals. Her approach to fiction and her insights were her own, and although she "epitomizes" her century, as Basil Willey expresses it (Century 260), her fiction was also unique in its time.
Literary criticism in the twentieth century initially established George Eliot’s position as a great writer by virtue of the "universality" and "profoundly moral character" of her themes, as Alan D. Perlis explains it (xv). Critics have long noted Eliot’s concern with the theme of growth in her central characters from egoism and/or self-delusion to self-knowledge and a capacity for empathy. Critics of the fifties and sixties, influenced by the New Critical emphasis on textual analysis, helped readers appreciate the formal qualities of Eliot’s art: the complex designs of her novels, the unifying imagery and symbolism, the rich sense of time and place that her writing evokes, and the psychological insight that distinguishes her characterizations from the novelists that preceded her. In the seventies and eighties, an explosion of interest in Eliot is reflected in the quantity, excellence, and variety of the criticism, which has added deconstructionist, feminist, and psychoanalytic dimensions to readers' understanding of her work. In addition, as Perlis notes, criticism in those decades has demonstrated that "the social context of Eliot’s work is so rich and complicated that historical, sociological, philosophical, and, perhaps most important, scientific events and discoveries, are intricately bound in the lives of Eliot’s characters" (xiv). Despite the general acceptance of Eliot’s position as one of the great English novelists, however, many critics have also seen flaws in her work which they often express in terms of her self-involvement with her idealized characters and/or the closely related problem of the forced endings of many of her novels. It was through my study of psychoanalysis, in conjunction with my work on George Eliot, that I began to see the connection between the artistic flaws in the novels and the author’s personal conflicts.
I also began to see the connection between the author’s personal conflicts and her denial of aggression in her idealized characters–a subject that has increasingly attracted the attention of critics. U. C. Knoepflmacher suggests in his bibliographic essay that the subject of aggression in Eliot’s fiction is one "worth considering more fully" by "practitioners of the psychoanalytical approach" (Victorian 257). In recent years, literary critics such as Carol Christ, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, William Myers, and Dorothea Barrett have noted Eliot’s apparent concern over the murderous potential of anger, a concern reflected, as Gilbert and Gubar observe, in her tendency to create idealized heroines who "repress anger" and "submit to renunciation" (490). My study, the first book-length psychoanalytic treatment of the subject of aggression in George Eliot’s novels, thus constitutes an attempt to respond to the need articulated by Knoepflmacher and other modern critics.
During the course of my psychoanalytic study of George Eliot’s fiction, I moved from my initial interest in the subject of narcissism, as reflected in my first published essay on Daniel Deronda(1987), to a more particular focus on aggression: the ways in which it is portrayed in the characters, the ways in which it is denied by the author, and the ways in which it affects the author’s creative process. While I began by applying the theories of two contemporary psychoanalysts, Otto F. Kernberg and Heinz Kohut, to my study of the novels, I discovered after the publication of my essays on Adam Bede(1989) and The Mill on the Floss(1990), that I needed to return to the writings of Sigmund Freud in my attempt to understand the character Silas Marner’s obsessive-compulsive behavior and its relationship to rage. At the same time, I also read the works of contemporary psychologists–behaviorists, cognitive psychologists, and psycho-pharmacologists–who offer differing perspectives on the obsessive-compulsive disorder. It was this year-long attempt to understand obsessions and compulsions (at the same time as I was writing my essay on Silas Marner) that resulted in a breakthrough in my thinking about George Eliot, for in the process I had uncovered the connection between rage and loss, and formulated my thesis that George Eliot’s fiction writing was her constructive response to unconscious mourning over the loss of her parents–a thesis that was bolstered by my study of Margaret S. Mahler’s work on the process of separation-individuation, and John Bowlby’s work on attachment, separation, and loss.
While I was writing the Silas Mamer essay, I also began to perceive what turned out to be a pattern, reflected in the timing and content of the published writings, of Eliot’s responses to the anniversaries of deaths in her family. My discovery of George H. Pollock’s The Mourning-Liberation Process, which includes a review of the psychoanalytic literature on anniversary reactions, provided theoretical support for my observations. The anniversary reaction, as I. L. Mintz explains it, is a response to the unconscious sense of time. It is a "time-specific variant of the repetition-compulsion"–a psychological response "arising on an anniversary of a psychologically significant experience which the individual attempts to master through reliving rather than through remembering" (720). The anniversary reaction is characterized by some form of reen-actment of events at a time when the mind associates present circumstances with one or more traumatic events of the past. Such reactions can occur at yearly, decade-long or other intervals, or at a particular time of day, month, or year; they can also occur in relation to the ages in a person’s life (or in the life of a loved one) with which traumatic events are associated. Such reactions may also be a sign that the necessary process of mourning for a lost loved one is not yet complete. Pollock’s assertion that the repeating patterns in an artist’s creative