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Article Excerpt
Human beliefs, like all other natural growths elude the barriers of system. George Eliot
The doctrine of separate spheres has long served a double function: as historical master narrative and as a set of ideas that has proven especially useful to feminist critics and scholars of the nineteenth century. Domestic ideology, as this post-eighteenth-century doctrine came to be known, split the social world of Great Britain into a public sphere--a realm of commerce, education, politics, and the professions--and a domestic sphere, that of hearth and home (see, e.g., David 9). By about 1840 popular educational treatises, religious manuals, sermons, conduct books, novels, scientific articles, and even philosophical tracts had defined man and woman as ascribable to differing spheres by virtue of differing natures. To him, it followed, went the world of competition and work. "To her went authority over the household, leisure time, courtship procedures, and kinship relations, and under her jurisdiction the most basic qualities of human identity were supposed to develop" (Armstrong 3).
However persuasive as history and however useful for critique, domestic ideology has been complicated lately by gender critics who question the stability of gender as a category (see, e.g., Fuss; Butler) and by literary historians who contend that the doctrine of separate spheres was not as monolithic as its adherents proposed and its early scholarly articulation attests. It is now clear, for instance, that English women did not make up a single sex class during the nineteenth century, despite the proliferation of writings which either presumed that they did or argued that they should. Quite a few women labored outside of the home, especially working-class women, who therefore had to reconcile wage-earning and domestic lives. Similarly, the middle-class women who labored in domestic industry did not comply with polarized sex roles by virtue of working alongside their husbands or other family members. Aristocratic women, for their part, often pushed against (even through) the elaborate set of prescribed attitudes, behaviors, and norms governing domesticity, particularly when living in cosmopolitan centers. In general, critics intent on complicating domestic ideology have focused on femininity rather than masculinity, its relational anchor. As part of engaging their work, I will consider the cross-gendered role of men in mothering and of women in agricultural management, concurrent preoccupations of Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), a George Eliot novel which treats motherhood as other than a woman's embodied responsibility. Throughout, I will argue that her novel wryly contests domestic ideology even as such an ideology is asserting its authority. A kind of gender critic "foremother," Eliot shows that raising a child to adulthood is not dependent on mothers or woman's nature and is actually a task that even an aging, hearing-impaired, mentally distracted, visually challenged, masculine miser can do. (1)
I.
Enthusiastically received in its day, Silas Marner has traditionally been read for either its fairy-tale or its romantic qualities. Fairy-tale readings tend to emphasize the spells that Silas undergoes, his hoard of gold, and the orphan child who arrives miraculously at his hearth (see, e.g., Stewart). From a fairy-tale perspective, the novel's most miraculous aspects are his dramatic decline and subsequent regeneration through parenting. By contrast, those who see romantic influences in Silas Marner tend to focus on its setting, an agricultural valley in the Midlands; its epigraph from Wordsworth's "Michael"; its villagers, with their rustic occupations; and especially its interiorized drama (see, e.g., Easson). Eliot provided evidence for these competing literary-historical readings by writing to John Blackwood, her publisher, and explaining in a 24 February 1861 letter how the idea for the novel emerged:
It came to me first of all, quite suddenly, as a sort of legendary tale, suggested by my recollection of having once, in early childhood, seen a linen weaver with a bag on his back; but as my mind dwelt on the subject, I became inclined to a more realistic treatment. (3: 382)
This part of the letter acknowledges legendary (i.e., fairy-tale) and romantic (e.g., the rustic linen weaver) influences but suggests Eliot went on to contain them within realism. Such a multigeneric effort would logically be unrealistic, if not proto-postmodern, if she were any less adept at weaving the differing settings, periods, and character types of her narrative. (2)
Eliot situates Silas Marner between the French Revolution and the first Reform Act--just after, in other words, "the vast upheavals in rural life which typify the 1790s" (Goode 19) and just prior to the difficult economic times following 1815. (3) By situating her novel in this way, she holds at bay the competitive forces of modernity so as to attribute to her locale a kind of fairytale timelessness. There is no evidence, for instance, that the rustic villagers have thought about the French Revolution or encountered the enclosure movement as the book begins. Indeed, Raveloe is both prosperous and protected from contemporary influences, since it resides "quite an hour's journey on horseback from any turnpike, where it was never reached by the vibrations of the coach horn, or of public opinion" (53). The primary reasons for its prosperity are, however, political and topical. The war years, which the locals misread as a sign of Providence rather than history, as permanence rather than temporality, have raised commodity prices to the point where farmers can farm badly and yet live well. The resulting "careless abundance" (64) diffuses from master to tenant and then throughout the artisanal community. Agricultural systems that work for all legitimate the "attitudinal and behavioral norms associated with paternalistic deference hierarchies" (Hadley 15) that govern rural life. It follows that Raveloe's tenants and townsfolk do not question the authority of those whom they perceive to be elites. Hence the vertical antagonism that arose in England following 1815, when economic groups competed for scarce resources, will not be much in evidence.
The opening sentence of Silas Marner treats domestic labor as its point of departure. Women work their spinning wheels in farmhouses, since they must do so to produce clothing, "and even great ladies" play on "toy spinning wheels" at their estates. Both kinds of women are, from the first, ironically contrasted to itinerant linen weavers, those "pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny countryfolk, looked like remnants of a disinherited race" (51). Himself a weaver, Silas spent the early years of adulthood selling his labor to a wholesale dealer...
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