THE POSSlBlLlTlES OF GIFTS: GEORGE ELIOT'S

SYSTEMS OF EXCHANGE

Stacey Armstrong

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts

Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia

August 1999

O Copyright by Stacey Armstrong, 1999

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Gentleman Can't Give Gifts: The Poison Gifts and Genuine Gifts of Adam Bede

2 Benevolent Vengeance and Wasteful Prodigality: Gifts Which Can Not Help But Give In The Mill on the Floss

3 Gift-Horses and lmpetuous Generosity: The Genuine and Poisonous Gifts of Middlemarch

4 Generous Parting, Generous Art: Gifts Without the Promise of Retum in Daniel Deronda

Works Cited

ABSTRACT

This thesis explores the ways in whidi George Eliot's representations of gifts

and gift-giving problematise but still keen towards the existence of generosity.

The Introduction gives a brief cultural, theoretical, and biographical

framework. It also offers the distinction in Eliot's work beîween two separate

modes of exchange: generous and exchangist. Chapter one examines the

difficulties of giving genuine gifts within the changing ecanornic landscape of

Adam Bede. Chapter two looks at the ways in which Maggie Tullivefs

wasteful prodigality provides occasions for gift-giving in The Mill on the Floss.

Chapter three exposes the difficulties faced by the characters in Middlemarch

who both possess money and long to give without creating poisoning

obligation. Chapter four further elucidates the difkulties faced by the

magnanimous tndividuals of Eliot's Daniel Deronda. Notes and a works Uted

are provided.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I extend much appreciation to Dr. Rohan Maitzen whose support and continuing engagement with George Eliot's work challenge(d) and enliven(ed) this project. I would also like to thank my parents, John and Cheryl Armstrong, for fielding many long distance and long, winding conversations.

INTRODUCTION

Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to put what I fear you rnay think an impertinent question? I never can go on with an address unless I feel, or know, that my audience are either with me or against me: ( f do not much care in beginning); but I must know where they are; and I would fain find out, at this instant, whether you think I am putting the motives of popular action too low. I am resolved to-night, to state them low enough to be admitted as probable; for whenever, in my writings on Political Economy, I assume that a M e honesty, or generosity, - - or what used to be called "virtue" - may be calculated upon as a human motive of action, people always answer me, saying, "You must not calculate on that: that is not in human nature: you must not assume anything to be cornmon to men but acquisitiveness and jealousy; no other feeling ever has influence on them, except accidentalty, and in matters out of the way of business."

John Ruskin - "Of King's Treasuriesn (1 4)

George Eliot's representations of gift-giving reflect the pervasive Victorian

concern for the existence of generosity in the face of profit-loss economics.

Instances of gift-giving abound in Eliot's texts. Her use of gifts addresses a

whole set of social practiœs that attempt to reconcile profit-loss economics

with acts of generosity. As Eliot's novels demonstrate repeatedly, gifts have a

capacity to trouble not just the distinction between public sphere economy

and private sphere morality, but also distinctions of class and gender. Almost

as often as Eliot depicts characters consurned by profit-loss economics, she

offers charactets who move through the worid sustaining a separate economy

based on generosity. By exploring the forms of exchange which deny gifts

and generosity, Eliot's sense of what constitutes generosity emerges - beginning with her belief in the existence of human experiences and

motivations which defy calculation, both qualitative and quantitative'. As

moments of giving accumulate, what becomes clear is that however

innocuous, generous or vengeful the intentions of the giver, gifts given either

without close attention to context or between people largely unknown by each

other can have unpredictable and often destructive results. Gifts that have

the most hope of being genuine are given without the intention of creating

controlling obligation; they neither fulfill a duty nor expect gratitude. Often

one act of kindness sets in motion a diffusion of generosity which far exceeds

the sentiments surrounding the initial gift.

While I have been influenced by some of the recent critical and

philosophical writing on gift-giving, I have chosen, for the most part, to use

both cultural criticism of Eliot's time, and her own texts in developing the

framework of my discussion. Conceptions of gift-giving enter into the

discourses of a world grappling with incommensurable value systems. The

question as to whether or not generosity exists underlies many of the social

and economic discourses of Eliot's time. Many English thinkers. such as

Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, embraced the assumptions of the

1 In her book George Eliot, Gillian Beer reflects that Eliot's use of generalisation never attempts to limit the possibilities open to humanity. She points out that Eliot found La Rouchefoucauld's assumption of human selfishness problematic because the assumptions are (quoting Eliot): "at once undeniably true and miserably false; true as applied to that condition of

ernpirical method in order to provide a "rational" discourse of human

experience and interaction based on an "essentiai" human nature that did not

contain generosity. Eliot's reading of Rousseau allowed her to consider the

limitations of the empirical method in describing human experiencee2 As a

result, the cultural discourses surrounding the existence of generosity form a

constellation of metaphors that resides in a larger galaxy of signifiers, shifting

within valences of necessity, value, debt, obligation, and gratitude. The basis

and terms in which human society could be discussed became more

divergent. Thomas Carlyle decries the dehumanising effects of

commercialisation on human relationships in Past and Present with his

cultivation of the term "Mammonism" to describe the narrowness of vision

exhibited by those whose primary desire is to make money. Relatedly, John

Ruskin's series of lectures "Sesame and Lilies" and "The Politicai Economy of

Art" attempt to eke out a space for both art and generosity in an economic

landscape which would deny both. In 1844, Ralph Waldo €merson3

human nature in which the selfish instincts are still dominant, false if taken as a representation of al1 the elements of human nature" (1 9). In his article "Two Liberal Traditions" Larry Siendentop discusses the ways in

which Rousseau critiques the empirical method for failing to explore "the conditions of social action - that iç, the sense in which it is only possible to speak of individual motives and intentions by placing them in a context of social rules" (1 55). Eliot's use of gift-giving in her fiction forms part of her cornmitment to a broader form of social studies. As my thesis attempts to show, there are social rules and expectations surrounding gifts that allow for a more compiex exploration of "individual motives and intentions." For more on Rousseau's influence on Eliot see Valerie Dodd's George Eliot: An Intellectuaf Life. While there is no direct evidence of Eliot reading Emerson's Essays, the two

met on a number of occasions. During the period of Eliot's life when she spent a great deal of her tirne with the Brays, Emerson visited the Brays on a number of occasions. As well, quotations from his writing appear in Cara

published a brief essay entitled "Gifts" which captures many of the primary

ambiguities that occur in attempting to give and discuss gifts in a society bent

on only participating in relationships calculated, at the very least, on equal

returns. In his essay, Emerson insists that both giver and receiver experience

some discornfort when a gift is not chosen or given correctly. He believes

that the most genuine gifts are those given between friends, where the

property and affections of one are already, for the most part, at the disposal of

the other. Obviously, this kind of giving can only describe a small portion of

the instances in which gift giving occurs.

In a capitalist system based on private property, genuine gifts present

an interpretive quagmire. Distinguishing the difference between a genuine

gift and a poisonous gift sometimes proves difficult. My test for a genuine gift

depends on Eliot's use of two separate economies within her work:

exchangist and generous. An exchangist economy ernbodies Carlyle's

Mammornism. Exchangists invest only if they are certain of a direct retum in

the form of money or a controlling gratitude. Conversely, a generous

economy contains acts of giving, based on a rnutuality that recognises and

accounts for the needs of the receiver. In my discussion poisonous gifts

reside within the channels of an exchangist economy while genuine gifts

circulate within a separate generous economy. Exchangist economy

supposes an inherently elitist conception of giving while a generous economy

assumes that al1 members of the community have the potential to give

Bray's Cornmonplace Book (Ashton 39). Gordon Haight relates that upon meeting Emerson in 1848, Eliot said he is "the first man I have ever seen"

genuine gifts. Because gifts exist both inside and outside these

incommensurable economies gift-giving produces moments of tension and

interpretive anxiety.

Emerson's ideal example assumes that the effects of gifts can remain

contained within a private sphere. Eliot's particular way of exercising the

limits of the novel form allows her room to explore gifts on multiple levels,

showing that an instance of giving affects more than just the giver and the

receiver. Eliot's idealisations of gifts occur as stories within her stories. In

this way, she can explore the nexus of values and metaphors surounding

gifts by providing more than one interpretation of a specific gift. Not just the

moment of giving or the object given bears scrutiny, but the expectations of

both the giver and receiver. Eliot's fiction presents the reader with a living

ethics of giving. I Say "living" because in her literary attempts to represent

gift-giving Eliot for the most part does not portray Emerson's genuine gift.

She shows that the contexts in which gifts occur are, Iike reality, rnessy. Any

ordered or static ethics of giving could not account for the diversity of hurnan

experience and interaction. Eliot depicts situations where a more careful

approach to giving would avert human suffering, suggesting that in giving a

gift a careful consideration of its effects must be taken. Mauss's rendering4 of

Hindu literature through conceptions of gifts communicates similar

165'. I Say "rendering of" for I have little knowledge of Hindu culture. Mauss has

been criticised by Levi-Strauss and others for the eurocentricism of his anthropological readings of other cultures. In my rnind, Mauss's reading of gift etiquette in this instance could potentiafly communicate more about his own cultural conceptions of gift-giving.

considerations. In each instance of giving "al1 kinds of precautions are taken"

The authors of the Codes and Epics spread themselves as only Hindu authors can on the theme that gifts, donors and things given are to be considered in their context, precisely and scrupiïlously, so that there may be no mistake about the manner of giving and receiving to fit each particular occasion. There is etiquette at every step. It is not the same as a market where a man takes a thing objectively for a price. Nothing is casual here. Contracts, alliances, transmission of goods, bonds created by these transfers - each stage in the process is regulated morally and economically. (59)

As Mauss suggests, people are not commodities. For the exchangists within

Eliot's fiction the assumption that people can be bought often proves fatal. In

the four novels I discuss, the events depicted turn on one character's ability or

inability to give or receive with a sense of context.

In each novel, whenever giving takes place a display, a rupture, or a

negotiation of power occurs. In Adam Bede, the residents of Hayslope

grapple with the collapse of feudal yenerosity and the emergence of

exchangist economy. Under these circumstances the casual gifts of Captain

Arthur Donnithorne to dairy maid Hetty Sorrel prove poisonous. As a way of

offsetting the opportunity for a casual kind of giving, Eliot suggests that gifts

should represent part of the giver's work in order to avoid the dangers of

decontextualisation. In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot associates gifts with the

inherent waste of nature. They operate both inside and outside the

exchangist economy exemplifiad by the business conducted in St. Oggs and

the economy of generosity swirling around Maggie. In Middlemarch, Eliot

focuses her exploration of gifts more specifically on the responsibilities of the

giver. The possession of money by givers. such as Bulstrode and Dorothea,

complicates the discemment of genuine gifts from poisonous gifts. In Daniel

Deronda, Eliot further explores the difficulty of those with the capacity and

desire to be generous. Daniel's redemption of Gwendolen's necklace is

juxtaposed with Grandcourt's gift of diamonds. While both instances of giving

irrevocably change Gwendolyn's sense of self, neither is completely

generous. As Eliot's fiction demonstrates, completely selfless giving lives as

an idea. The best practical manifestations of this ideal occur as acts of

enlightened self-interest.

In order to further introduce some of the difficulties of interpreting gifts

that I explore in the following chapters, I offer a few excerpts from Eliot's

letters. Eliot's attitude to writing and receiving letters represents the

difficulties of distinguishing and signifying generous economies from

exchangist economies. In The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans, Rosemarie

Bodenheimer points out that Eliot "is very conscious of the debt inwrred in

sending or receiving a letter" (40). The very act of letter-writing itself

becomes entangled in the debit and credit metaphors of exchangism. Eliot

metâphorically conveys the sense that letters both economically incur a debt

on the receiver's part and potentially contain effort and sentiments that she

not only cannot return but does not exactly desire to return, signifying her

sense that the metaphors she uses inadequately express relationships. In an

early letter, Eliot frames her letter writing relationship with Martha Jackson in

terms of debt and currency:

1 am inclined to calculate the weight of feeling inversely to that of expression, and lest you should have adopted the same mathematics, i will secure myself against the suspicion of indifference to you by not once telling you that I was glad to see your delegate this morning, and by liquidating my debt to you "incontinent," as Knox would Say, prove that I am desirous to have further traffic with you. It is true that al1 my cash is just now copper. and payment is likely to prove both to you and me a heavy one; but if I waited till I could send gold, you rnight confidently book mine as a bad debt. (2:35)

By eliding economic metaphors with the sentiments of friendship, Eliot shows

how diffïcult it becomes to speak of gifts without invoking notions of

calculation, debt or gratitude. Paradoxically, Eliot's letter conveys just what

she says she intends it not to Say. While refusing to Say "thanks," she still

expresses her relationship in terms of gratitude and obligation for fear of

misinterpretation. She writes that by not expressing thanks, she will willingly

be in her friend's debt, representing her desire for further correspondence or

relations. In this instance, then, to express gratitude forthwith suliies the

purity of the original gift but something still compels Eliot to reply immediately.

The interval of time between the reception of a gift and the receiver's

acknowledgment becomes important. The potential for returning a gift with

interest, as in Eliot's gesture towards the transformation of copper into gold in

the "goodness of time," invokes the complications of investment. As

Genevieve Vaughan makes clear in Forgiving: A Feminist Cnticism of

Exchange, the distinction between economies based on exchange and

economies based on generosity is that exchange "is giving in order to

receive" (30). What seems like a simple exchange becomes burdened with

the conception of debt and good faith. Eliot's letter implies that in a perfect

instance of giving, no display of gratitude would or should be expected

because it suggests expectations of a profit on the part of the giver. and

hence questions the initial motivations of the gift- fndeed, in a letter written to

Charles Bray thanking him for some salmon, Eliot clearly contends that to not

have to thank a friend for a gift is an expression of the depth of feeling and

the value of the relationship. She writes, "In return for those two glorious

salrnons of yours I send you a sprat, because I am not in the humour to write

much and I mean to pay you the greatest of compliments - that of neglecting

you without making any apologies - wherefrom you rnay gather that I truly

love you" (2:44). In a relationship between friends what each brings is always

enough. A genuine gift is not given to make the receiver feel inadequate.

Thus, any exchanges attempting to instiil a directed sense of obligation or

debt in the receiver do not represent true gifts, for they imply calwlation that

may be viewed as a profit motive.

Eliot's own fears of debt and her desire to earn honest rnoney inform

her sense of what constitutes generosity. In a letter to her publisher John

Blackwood in 1859, Eliot communicates an interesting tension between her

need for money, and the nobility of self-sufficiency in the face of generosity

and her reading public:

Thank-you: first, for acting with that fine integrity which makes part of my faith in you; secondly, for the material sign of that integrity. I don7 know which of those two things I care for most - that people should act nobly toward me, or that I should get honest money. I certainly care a great deal for the money, as I suppose all anxious minds do that love independence and have been brought up to think debt and begging the two deepest dishonours short of crime. (3:69)

As steeped in exchangist metaphors as her characters, Eliot recognises that

to owe money or to be in need of money shapes subjectivity. Her desire to

infuse her relationship with Blackwood with bath the metaphors of generous

economy and exchangist economy extends into her fiction. Her novels can

be viewed as a series of thought experiments5 striving to find a model of

giving that allows generosity and capitalism to CO-exist. Although i have

offered a disclaimer of an absolutist ethics of giving on Eliot's part, my thesis

does show that while she exposes the impossibility of giving a genuine gift,

Eliot privileges generous economy over exchangist econorny. Within Eliot's

texts, any atternpt to approach, appreciate, and recognise another human

being enough to give a genuine gift exists as a laudable goal.

- - - - - - - - -

A similar view of Eliot's work is also suggested by Bert G. Homback in "The Moral Imagination of George Eliot." Reflecting on the characters of Middlemarch, he writes: "The Middlemarch people are al1 the subjects of a 'Study'; and for al1 their rich vitality, they belong in a real and serious way to a research project almost as rnuch as they do to imaginative Iiterature" (163).

CHAPTER ONE

Gentleman Can't Give Gifts: The Poison Gifts and Genuine Gifts of Adam Bede.

But our tokens of compliment and love are for the most part barbarous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores society in so far to its prirnary basis, when a man's biography is conveyed in his gift, and every man's wealth is an index of his merit. But it is a cold Iife-less business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a gold- smith's. This is fit for kings, and rich men who represent kings, and a false state of property, to make presents of gold and silver stuffs, as a kind of symbolical sin-offering, or payment of black-mail. (Emerson, " G ift s" 376)

The most genuine gifts in Adam Bede occur in moments in which individual

characters give from a situation that best represents their ongoing work and

struggles. As Emerson suggests above, if people limit their giving to that

which is close or contextual ta themselves, it eliminates the kind of

casualness and mediation of exchange that occurs in the markets of

bourgeois capitalism. By giving work a carlyleanl transcendental quality.

1 Carlyle fuses action and work with a passionate conviction. He holds idleness to be the largest evil and in this the Aristoaacy's adoption of Mammonism becomes directly linked to Dilettantism. In Past and Present he rails against Marnmonisrn and Dilettantism, opening a space for work infused with a dynamic transcendental quality:

Eliot suggests that work can operate as genuine gift when it exceeds

exchangist economics. In every instance in Adam Bede, characters'

occupations or work shapes the kind of gifts - genuine or poisonous - that

they can give. It is the weary Adam building his father's coffin. a harvest

supper hosted by the Poysers. the sympathetic Dinah waiting for death with

Hetty in prison, or even Hetty's pink handkerchief which Arthur hastily hides in

the wastepaper basket of the hermitage which suggest the intended

generosity that must be invested in a genuine gift. Eliot juxtaposes these

moments of generosity with exchangist moments of giving. Indeed, "the

apologies for gifts" the young squire Arthur Donnithorne gives to the dairy

rnaid Hetty Sorrel incite much of the drama in Eliot's first novel. Like

Emerson's 'apologies for gifts," Arthur's gifts to Hetty can not be genuine gifts

because they do not represent his work.

Eliot suggests that Arthur's lack of genuine work is a result of the shift

from feudal to capital e c o n ~ r n ~ . ~ ldeally and perhaps traditionally, the

- -- --

As if in truth, there were no God of Labour; as if godlike Labour and brutal Mammonism were convertible terrns. A serious, most earnest Mammonism grown Midas-eared; an unserious Dilettantism, earnest about nothing, grinning with inarticulate incredulous incredible jargon about al1 things, as the enchanted Dilettanti do the Dead Sea! It is mournfui enough, for the present hour; were there not an endless hope in it withal. Giant Labour, tniest emblem there is of God the World- Worker, Demiurgus. and Etemal Maker; noble Labour, which is yet to be the King of this Earth, and sit on the highest throne ... .Labour must become a seeing rational giant, with a sou1 in the body of him, and take his place on the throne of things, - leaving his Mammonism, and several other adjuncts, on the lower steps of said throne. (1 76)

As the title of Brian 0. Beyers' article "Adam Bede: Society in Flux" suggests, many of the critics who have done work on Adam Bede point to Eliot's use of the changes in economy during the eighteenth and early

landholderltenant relationship is based on an acknowledged one-way

hierarchy of generosity in which the Iandholder demonstrates power through

the capacity to lose and expend. Whenever the giving of a gift occurs it

suggests that the giver has the power and ability to accept and even court an

(initial) loss. This expenditure of wealth is particularly evident within a feudal

economy, where the benefits of the aristocracy's giving cannot always be

irnmediately discerned. In Adam Bede, Eliot demonstrates the ineffectual

giving of the aristocracy by representing both a feudal feast and an

exchangist tryst. In order to explore the shift in the values of the landed

gentry, Eliot uses gifts to show that neither the waning feudalism nor the

emerging exchangism have the capacity to recognise or incorporate

generosity or genuine gifts. Although Eliot depicts the aristocracy's inability to

perpetuate an economy of generosity, a few of her characters struggle

towards a new ethics of giving which privileges not profit but the

nineteenth centuries as providing the tensions in the narrative. In The Country and the City, the Marxist critic Raymond Williams situates Eliot's work within the difficulties posed by industrialisation, but asserts that the notion of generosity (Le. kindness, mutuality, and egalitarianism) is usually located in the rural past. He says that Eliot withdraws " from any full response to an existing society. Value is in the past, as a general retrospective condition, and is in the present only as a particular and private sensibility, the individual moral action" (180). My thesis, while situated within the same context of the representation of the effects of industrialisation and capital economy on Victorian society, posits that through the representation of genuine and poisonous gifts in her fiction, Eliot demonstrates that individuaf moral actions (or instances of giving) do address, and engage with social issues. Far from suggesting generosity as a remnant of a past value system, Eliot shows that the impetus towards generosity exists as a present and perhaps inherent element of human society. Jan Milner, in The Structure of Values in George Eliot, recognises Eliot's cornmitment to representing (some) of her characters as social beings who have the capacity to perform acts that exceed personal interest or instant gratification.

establishment of a community of equal opportunity giving rooted in sympathy

and generosity. Besides the feast and the tryst, Eliot offers other moments of

giving in Adam Bede that highlight shifts in power and authority by showing

which rnembers of the community retain or gain the power to give and

receive3 genuine gifts.

The tensions within Adam Bede occur as a result of the dislocation of

the traditional feudal model of gift-giving. Like Carlyle in Past and ~ r e s e n f ,

Eliot shows the ways in which the aristocracy has begun to fail to meet its

obligations within the feudal economy by no longer providing beneficent

leadership. While members of the Young England movement and the Oxford

ovem ment' maintained their beiief in the ability of feudalism and its

hierarchical power structure to meet the needs of England, Eliot less

nostalgically shows that feudalism undoubtediy is in the process of ending!

3 I mention receiving because, as Nietzsche maintains in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, refusing a gift also demonstrates agency, as it suggests an awareness of the wrnplexities of the intentions of both the giver and the receiver. He advises those who think they have nothing to give to "be reserved in accepting! Distinguish by accepting!" (201 ). 4 While Carlyle maintains that people, for the most part, need to be ruled by a benevolent elite, he rejects and dismisses the landed-aristocracy of Victorian England from the elite because of their adoption of Dillettantism (1 55). Indeed, Carlyle places Mammonists ahead of the traditonal aristocracy because they at the very least are active. In Adam Bede, Eliot gives Arthur some dilettante characteristics She implies that his seduction of Hetty occurs as a result of his breaking his arm and being unable to join his regiment in Windsor (168-1 73).

In Geome Eliot and The Politics of National Inheritance. Bernard Semrnel notes that Eliot was critical of Disraeli's Young England: "a group of Tories who called for a revival of paternalistic feudal traditionsm(l 19).

Eliot's life-long engagement with Sir Walter Scott's fiction provides some context for her depiction of the end of feudalism. Particularly, Scott's novel Waverly captures the social upheaval caused by the transition from feudal to capital economy. In the Postscript, Scott writes: "The gradua1 influx of wealth,

Although possessing different motives. both Squire Donnithorne and Arthur

adopt exchangist economic principles which cause the further diminishment

of feudal benevolence and power.

The slide from public display and participation in exchange (feast) to

private secret forms of expenditure (tryst) caused the dissolution of traditional

feudal manifestations of expenditure and display that provided channels for

generosity. Jürgen Habermas explores the nature of the function of the

aristocracy in Structural Transformation, arguing that aristocratic power

displays itself within the representation of an individual person:

This publicness (or publicity) of representation was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status attribute.. . For representation pretended to make something invisible visible through the public presence of the lord.. . . Representation in the sense in which the members of a national assembly represent the nation or a lawyer represents his clients and nothing to do with this publicity of representation inseparable from the lord's concrete existence, that, as an 'aura,' surrounded and endowed with authority. (7)

Habermas argues that by the end of the eighteenth century this kind of

aristocratic representativeness begins to disappear for "the nobleman was

authority inasmuch as he made it present. He displayed it, embodied it in his

cuitivated personality," but "the bourgeoisie could no longer represent ... by its

very nature it could no longer create for itself a representative publicness.. .

The nobiernan was what he represented; the bourgeois what he produced"

and extension of commerce, have since united to render the present people of Scotland as different from their grandfathers as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth's tirne" (1 :376). In reading Adam Bede, the differences between those participating in either the feudal or the capital often

(1 3). In Adam Bede, Eliot explores the way in which the feudal structures of

Hayslope continue to place al1 actions within the public sphere so that any

private or secret exchanges bewme associated with a capitalist econorny

and its metaphors.

The representativeness of the aristocracy in Adam Bede crumbles as

the novei continues. Eliot gives the reader the sense that the inherent nobility

and generosity once contained within the Donnithomes' position is fading.

Mr. Donnithorne has less and less interest in maintaining the distance from

the tenantry needed to produce this sense of nobility and authority. He

becomes more of a manager of the land, forfeiting his ties to the land and

placing limits on his expenditure. His work becomes rnotivated less by a

sense of identity and more by a desire to rnake and hoard money.

Eliot and Bataille give this shift an even more economic focus by

offering the contrast between a public feudal economy of expenditure and a

bourgeois economy of accumulation and private consurnption. Bataille notes

the tjourgeoisie:

has distinguished itself from the aristocracy through the fact that it has consented only to spend for itself, and within itself - in other words, by hiding its expenditures as rnuch as possible from the eyes of the other classes. The rationalist conceptions developed by the bourgeoisie, starting in the seventeenth century, were a response to these humiliating conceptions of restrained expenditure; this rationalism meant nothing other than the strictly economic representation of the world - economic in the vulgar sense, the bourgeois sense, of the word. (1 76)

produce a sense of anachronism. For more on Scott and Victorian notions of history see A. Dwight Culler's The Victonan Mirror of History.

Mr. Donnithorne abandons his ability to expend and adopts the Mammonism

of a rationalist economy. Arthur expresses his amarement to Mr. lrwine at his

grandfather's escalating wish to Save money by taking on duties usually given

to members of the community promoting feudal generosity. "He's got some

project or other about letting the Chase Farm, and bargaining for a supply of

milk and butter for the house. But I ask no questions - it makes me too

angry. I believe he means to do ail the business himself, and have nothing in

the shape of a steward" (303). Mr. Donnithorne continues to "bargain" his

way through the narrative, limiting not only the appearance of expenditure.

but also its actuality in the lives of his tenants in his atternpt to accumulate

capital. As Arthur points out, his grandfather's hoarding of money for his

inheritance presents an interesting paradox of a poisonous gift parallel to Mr.

Irwine's reference to Aeschylus's "unloving love" (302).

For the most part, the residents of Hayslape depend on the channels

created by the traditional relationship between the landholder and the

tenantry in order to circulate goods. Eliot spends a great deal of her text

establishing the rnovements and networks created between the characters

based on their relationship to the Donnithorne estate. The movements of the

Bede and Poyser families in particular illustrate the continuing influence of the

Donnithornes in al1 aspects of the village econorny. Eliot shows that Mr.

Donnithorne (senior) has the power to rent the Poyser farm to another family,

while he c m also change the Bedes' economic future by giving Adam the

management of the woods. As an artisan working for Mr. Burge, Adam is

less directly connected financially to the Donnithornes. As the narrator notes,

however, he does have constant contact with Arthur throughout his childhood.

In this way, Eliot shows that the channels of generosity within feudalism are

often less about money and more to do with the status gamered by

preferment. The onn ni th orne family. particularly Arthur's grandfather, shirks

its responsibilities to their land and its residents. Squire Donnithome, more

than anyone else in the narrative, becomes associated with a stinginess of

expression which rather than even being utilitarian represents a blind

selfishness nonnally associated with bourgeois capitalism. Mr. Donnithorne

manifests his abandonment of feudal generosity and display by failing io

rnake repairs to the buildings and fences on his estate and limiting the

amount of money Arthur c m spend on planning his birthday feast.

Although given on a budget, the birthday feast exemplifies a situation

in which organised expenditure and gift giving within a feudal economy still

occur. All members of the wmrnunity attending the feast have an assigned

and appropriate place to sit and eat, based not only on wealth but on the

different kinds of work that they do. The narrator notes when describing the

different tables and spaces Arthur has arranged that "Adam was not the only

guest invited to corne up-stairs on other grounds than the amount he

contributed to the rent-roll. There were other people in the two parishes who

derived dignity from their functions rather than from their pockets" (304). As a

gift, the feast represents a manifestation of an underlying generosity or waste.

The ways in which value is determined are diverse and not rationally

calculable. Eliot's use of the feast as a gift in Adam Bede parallels the way in

which Bataille reads the feeling of generosity or expenditure within the social

rituals of feast or parade which help to form a sense of community. The

feudal feast then becomes an assertion of wasteful expending in which the

whole community participates. In fact, it is a duty on the part of the land-

holding aristocracy to show such sacrifices both as a manifestation of their

power but also as a way of expressing their ties and servitude to their

tenantry. But while the birthday feast within Adam Bede appears to serve its

function, there is a sense in which it no longer meets the expectations or

shifting values of ail of those present7 Added to this sense is the reader's

Set in 1799 the feast day represented in Adam Bede provides an interesting contrast to a similar occasion in Eliot's final novel Daniel Deronda. The differences further elucidate the changing functions of the destruction or using up of wealth as a means of sustaining or destroying community.

lt was always a beautiful scene, this dance on New Year's Eve, which had been kept up by family tradition as nearly in the old fashion as inexorable change would allow. Red carpet was laid down for the occasion; hothouse plants and evergreens were arranged in bowers at the extremities and in every recess of the gallery; and the old portraits stretching back through generations even to the pre-portraying period, made a piquant line of spectators. Some neighboring gentry, major and minor, were invited; and it was certainly an occasion when a prospective master and mistress of Abbot's and King's Topping might see the future glory in an agreeable light, as a picturesque provincial supremacy with a rent-roll personified by the most prosperous looking tenants. (377-378)

The New Year's eve party to which Sir Hugo invites his chief tenantry is not an opportunity for the giving of gifts or a circulation of wealth so much as it is a spectacle of wealth on Sir Hugo's part for those of the same social position as himself. m i l e al1 the tenants of the Donnithorne Estate are invited ta participate in the feast in Adam Bede, Eliot communicates a kind of xenophobia in the guest list to the celebration in Daniel Deronda. As I have already discussed, in the instance of Adam Bede Eliot chooses a different means of exploring the decline of generosity within the feudal economy.

knowledge of Arthur's clandestine relationship with Hetty, which continues to

intrude into the narrative of the feast with the narrator's careful rerninders that

"candid people have their secrets, and secrets leave no lines in young faces"

(300).

At the feast, Eliot allows the reader a number of different readings of

Arthur. For instance, Hetty mistakenly imagines him radiating nobility amidst

a party of the aristocracy. After Arthur gives his speech to the tenantry dining

upstairs, the narrator offers a comparison between Arthur and Mr. Invine:

"The superior refinement of his face was much more striking than that of

Arthur's when seen in comparison with the people round them. Arthur's was

a much commoner British face, and the splendour of his new-fashioned

clothes was more akin to the young farmer's taste in costume than Mr.

Invine's fine powder, and the well-brushed but well-worn black, which seemed

to be his chosen suit for great occasions; for he had the mysterious secret of

never wearing a new-looking coat" (312). On a number of occasions Eliot's

narrator describes the effect of Arthur's aristocratie "representation" on the

tenants, while at the same tirne providing a contrast which shows the

transition from feudalism to capitalism and by extension the aristocracy's slide

into bourgeois concerns. The narrator likens Arthur's taste in clothes to a

farmer's, closing the social "representative" gap between himself and his

tenantry, particularly the Poysers. This preference of costume on Arthur's

part signifies the collapsing difference in status between himself and the

tenantry. Eliot times the occurrence of Arthur's attraction to and consequent

affair with Hetty in order to illustrate the ways in which circumstance affects

the circulation of gifts. Ten or twenty years in the future the match between

Hetty and Arthur would appear less inappropriate. Indeed, even Arthur's view

of his relationship with Hetty changes; he imagines himself both as her feudal

lord (1 84) and as her husband (198). Mr. Invine's "superior refinement" to

Arthur provides a glirnpse of the egalitarian economy of generosity

represented within Adam Bede. Like Dinah and Adam, Mr. InMne gives only

frorn and of hirnself, always aware of context. His never new-looking coat

suggests this contextual attentiveness.

The fact that Arthur has the capacity to buy gifts far removed from the

day-to-day affairs of the village rneans he has more leisure time and leisure

money than the majority of the other residents of Hayslope. Outside of the

usual channels in which feudal gifts travel, Arthur's gifts become dangerous

and take on a cavalier or casual quality. As his Aunt Lydia's gifts at the

games illustrate, within a feudal economy Arthur is only supposed to give gifts

based on necessity. Emerson, too, points out that giving to necessity c m be

less dangerous than giving to fulfil a dream:

For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and beauty everyday, and one is glad when an imperative leaves him no option, since if the man at the door have no shoes, you have not to consider whether you could procure him a paint-box. And as it is always pleasing ta see a man eat bread, or drink water, in the house or out of doors, so it is always a great satisfaction to supply these first wants. Necessity does everything well. In our condition of universal dependence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give ail that is asked, though at great inwnvenience. If it be a fantastic desire, it is better to leave to others the office of punishing him. I can think of many parts I should prefer playing to that of the Furies. Next to things of necessity, the rule for a gift, which one of my friends prescribed, is,

that we might convey to some person that which properly belonged to his character, and was easily associated with hirn in thought. (Emerson 375)

While Arthur attempts ta meet everyone's desires out of a generous nature,

his aunt will give nothing which is not "useful and substantial," bowing to laws

of necessity as dictated by feudalism (321 ).

Hetty and Arthur's relationship proves poisonous when manifested in

any other terms than those of feudal responsibility. The gifts given within their

tryst must remain a secret, breaching the public feudal channels in which he

can appropriately give Hetty gifts. Although he criticizes his grandfather for

his stinginess, Arthur's relationship with Hetty combines the one-way giving of

feudalism with the limitations of an ungenerous capitalism. Arthur's wish to

accomrnodate both his own and Hetty's desire for instant gratification mirrors

the expectation of direct reciprocity within an exchangist economy. "That little

wish. so naively uttered, seemed to him the prettiest bit of childishness - he

had never heard anything like it before; and he had wrapped the box up in a

great many covers, that he might see Hetty unwrapping it with growing

curiosity. till at last her eyes fiashed back their new delight into his" (295). A

moment of whimsical indulgence on Arthur's part without clearly defined

terms for the acceptance of the necklace and eanings causes a difference in

expectations which proves fatal for Hetty and life-altering for Arthur.

Hetty has very little choice in the work she does. As a woman and an

orphan, Hetty does not own any time; al1 of her time belongs to the Poysers.

All of her secret meetings with Arthur can be said to be time stolen from the

Poysers and by extension from the entire cornmunity. Her 'error' rests in her

initial belief that she and Arthur c m trade 'gifts' as equals, that her beauty is

equivalent to his social position and what it can buy. To her. his gifts suggest

this promise. Like Emerson's conception of "fantastic desire," Hetty's desire

for the emerging luxury commodities of capitaiism is fantastical for a

dependent dairymaid ensconced within a feudal economy. Hetty, necessarily

and perhaps less consciously than Squire Donnithorne. hoards her luxury

items, exhibiting the bourgeois tendency to secrecy and accumulation.

Significantly, in the giving of his gift to Hetty, Arthur does not consider what

Hetty is actually capable of receiving or displaying but instead attempts to

fulfill a "fantastic desire." He then, as Emerson suggests, leaves Hayslope,

allowing others to punish her misplaced desire. Hetty's tragedy rests within

the same liminal space that Adam more effectively negotiates. Caught within

the feudal landscape. she dreams too soon of a bourgeois womanh~od.~

Another dreamer of bourgeois womanhood, Bessy Craig. offers an interesting contrast to Hetty. Eliot depicts her experience of the races at the birthday feast, providing another instance in which the gifts offered by the aristocracy no longer meet the emerging desires for luxury items. Interestingly, Arthur's giving nature also leans towards meeting Bessy's desires; when he sees Bessy's disappointment at the flannel and grogram gown, he promises himself to find her later and give her some money so that she can buy something more to her liking. Eliot parallels the desires Hetty and Bessy have for material extravagance to force the reader to recognise that the only difference between them is Hetty's beauty: a gift or excess produced by nature which also cornes with its effects although not holding any significant exchange value (321). The many different ways in which Hetty's beauty is viewed by those around her speaks directly to this struggle. While her beauty is a "gift" of nature which affects those around her, its exchange value becomes difficult to determine within the shift from feudal to capital economy where the traditional roles of tenant and landholder give way to a structure which allows for greater social rnobility. Eliot also contrasts Bessy and Hetty's treatment of earrings. Bessy wears her cheap earrings in

While Eliot often depicts Arthur as having an innate sense of

generosity and benevolence, he is unable to re-activate the hierarchical

feudal generosity which he finds wanting in his grandfather. Caught in the

economic transition as much as those around him, he cannot continue to act

generously without taking into account the expectations of others. The time

and thoughts of al1 the tenantry no longer belong only to his family and the

land. His gifts to Hetty and Adam are poisonous because they are given

within "a false state of property" (Emerson 376). His interactions with Hetty,

Adam, and finally Dinah illustrate his developing recognition of the changes,

but a recognition too late either to Save Hetty or to allow him to remain in

Hayslope as a kind of benevolent manager. In Habermas's terms, the

appearance of nobility in Arthur cannot be maintained. The very ways in

which he wishes to represent himself to those around him are undergoing

change. Eliot further suggests a corruption of feudal principles because even

the supposedly pure giving of the feast day, with its function of creating and

sustaining community, occurs during Arthur's seduction of Hetty, a major

betrayal of his obligation to his 'subjects.'

In contrast to Arthur's inability ta give genuine gifts, Eliot's eponymous

hero of the novel, Adam, strives towards independence and the ownership of

his time and thoughts, representing a kind of necessary replacing of the ties

public and is rebuked by Dinah, while Hetty hides hers in her bureau, concealing !hem from Dinah. This contrast allows the reader to better understand the desires and values of both. Eliot shows that while Hetty desires bourgeois womanhood, she is sacially conscious enough to recagnise the impossibility of publicly wearing Arthur's gift.

of feudalism with a capitalisrn infused with generosity. In Pasf and mesent,

Carlyle calls for the emergence of a group of individuals he names the

"Working Aristocracy" who "must strike into a new path; must understand that

money alone is not the representative either of man's success in the world, or

of man's duties to man: and reform their own selves from top to bottom"

(1 83). Adam begins to strike out this new path. His movements illuminate

Hayslope's declining feudal system of exchange while also illustrating some

of the potentially laudable elements of capitalism, namely an egalitarianism of

giving. Eliot places Adam on the borders of the economic transition, enabling

him to discern the apparent moral difference between the gifts which Arthur

and his family give to the community through the birthday feast and those

secret gifts of jewelry and attentions which Arthur bestows on Hetty. Genuine

giAs, then, become the hub, detector and protector of Carlyle's "Working

Aristocracy"

There is a strange ambiguity in the way in which Adam treats his

appointment to the management of the woods. Adam, clear about his gifts

and the energy he places in the work he does, views his appointment not as a

favour but as an appropriate use of the skills he has learned and aquired.

Some of the onlookers at the feast believe he has too much pride but Adam is

careful not to express too much gratitude:

'1 am quite taken by surprise,' he said. ' 1 didn't expect anything O' this sort. for it's a good deal more than my wages. But I've the more reason to be grateful, to you Captain, and to you. Mr. Irwine, and to al1 my friends here. who've drunk rny health and wished me well. It 'ud be nonsense for me to be saying. I don't at ail deserve th' opinion you have of me; that 'ud be poor thanks to you, to Say that you've known

me ail these years; and yet haven't sense enough to find out a great deal O' the truth about me. You think, if I undertake to do a bit O' work, l'II do it well, be my pay big or iittle - and that's twe. I'd be ashamed to stand before you here if it wasna true. But it seerns to me, that's a man's plain duty, and nothing to be conceited about, and it's pretty clear to me as I've never done more than my duty; for let us do what we will, it's onfy making use O' the sperrit and the powers that ha' been given us. And so this kindness O' yours, I'm sure, is no debt you owe me, but a free gift, and as such I accept it and am thankful. (314)

The trust implied within his appointment allows Adam to accept the

preferment as a genuine gift because he sees it as an equal exchange.

Situated within both feudal and capitalist economies, he still insists that the

energies and motivations supporting the appointment exceed any conception

of it in terms of obligation or wages. Adam distinguishes himself by accepting

this gift without acknowledging the creation of debt or obligation on either

side. Furthermore, Eliot demonstrates Adam's capacity to navigate both

economies when his acceptance takes place "privately" or in a "tryst-like"

situation first and then in a public moment of celebration. First he recognises

it as a genuine gift given to him within the channels of feudal economy, but

then goes on to frarne it as a capitalist exchange. By conceiving of it within

both economies, he declares himself as possessing gifts of equal value: the

preferment becomes a marker of both generosity and exchange.

Writing after the demise of feudalism, Emerson maintains that gifts

given without the intention of creating gratitude or obligation are those which

occur between friends or at the very least equals:

You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in his debt by his magnanimity. The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, wrnpared with the sewice he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike

before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render hirn seems small. (378)

Adam's own magnanirnity and his expectation of magnanimity in others

differentiates him from Arthur. Unlike his grandfather, Arthur possesses the

desire to be generous. In fact, Eliot's early descriptions of him in chapter 12

irnply that his generosity is a fault because it is "impetuous, warm-blooded,

leonine; [and j never crawl ing , crafty , reptilian" (1 69). As the narrator relates,

Arthur's good looks and money enable him to charm and buy his way out of

acts of poisonous giving:

Whether he would have self-mastery enough to be always harmless and purely beneficent as his good-nature led hirn to desire, was a question that no one had yet decided against him; he was but twenty- one, you remember; and we don7 inquire too cfosely into character in the case of handsome generous young fellow, who will have property enough to support numerous peccadilloes - who, if he should unfortunately break a man' s leg in his rash driving, will be able to pension him handsomely; or if he should happen to spoil a woman's existence for her, will make it up to her with expansive bon-bons, packed up and directed by his own hand. (1 70)

By using gifts to smooth out the disturbances his impetuousness creates,

Arthur attempts to right the giving of poison gifts with more poison gifts.

Arthur believes that he has the right to detemine what constitutes damage

and how he can rectify that damage. Adam, however, challenges Arthur's gift

trajectory. He asserts that the receivers of Arthur's gifts should be given more

careful consideration. As Arthur's tryst with Hetty bears out, there are no

instances in which "bon-bons" could ever redress the damages of a poison

g ift.

When Adam discovers the trysting pair in the woods, he recognizes the

relationship's potential effects on the community. He engages in dialogue

with Arthur as an equal: "1 don? forget what's owing to you as a gentleman;

but in this thing we're man and man. and I can't give up"(354). Adam asserts

his emerging sense that he has a right and a duty to remind the Donnithornes

of the kind of ties and responsibilities people living in the same community

have to each other. At the same time that Adam attempts this reminder, he

collapses the hierarchical nature of feudalism by questioning Arthur's

narrative of his relationship with Hetty. Value and meaning can no longer be

represented, determined or appointed by the aristocracy atone. Whether

confined within the strictures of the feudal or the capital, Adam asserts the

underlying existence of a generosity of will.

Adam becomes Hetty's champion and in a way this is fitting for Hetty

possesses no legitimate time of her own to be dreaming of or participating in

the kind of relationships amongst equals that Adam has within the community.

As Adam castigates him, Arthur attempts to play out his role as feudal lord

with absolute authority. The narrator notes, "A patronising disposition always

has its meaner side, and in the confusion of his irritation and alarm there

entered the feeling that a man to whom he had shown so much favour as to

Adam, was not in a position to criticise his conductn (343). Arthur, no longer

able to control or project the authority of the aristocracy, begins to think of

Adam's prefenent as the kind of "sin offering" Emerson applies to poisonous

gifts. Arthur's dilemma becomes more and more apparent as he attempts to

make amends with gifts. His generous nature has no real work to channel

into; he iiterally enacts Emerson's apologetically poisonous gifts.

He had been the same Arthur ever since, trying to make al1 offence forgotten in benefits. If there were any bitterness in his nature, it could only show itself against the man who refused to De conciliated by him. And perhaps the time was come for some of that bitterness to rise. At the first moment, Arthur had felt pure distress and self-reproach at discovering that Adam's happiness was involved in his relation to Hetty: if deeds of gift, or any deeds, could have restored Adam's contentment and regard for hirn as a benefactor, Arthur would not only have executed them without hesitation, but would never have been weary of making amends. (357)

Adam accuses Arthur of poisoning Hetty with his secret giRs to her.g When

Arthur offers to shake hands with Adam as a peace offering Adam refuses to

accept this gift without first discussing the terms by which it will be received

(352). He also gives back his appointment to the woods. Without the threads

of beneficence, Arthur's gifts are reduced to apologies tied neither to the land

nor to himself. As the work he traditionally would have performed approaches

obsofescence, Arthur's gifts are tied neither to feudal generosity, or to the

transcendental conception of work lauded by Carlyle.

Eliot conveys Adam's liminal status further in a conversation he has

with Bartle Massey, in which he describes why there are bad feelings

between himself and Mr. Donnithome. Adam, having built a frame for Miss

Liddy's embroidery, has diffiwlty with the Squire over the arnount he charges

her for his work.

'Well, she was mighty pleased with the screen, and then she wanted to know what pay she was to give me. I didn't speak at random- you

As first noted by Mauss in his journal article "Gift, Gift," the volatile nature of gifts is manifested linguistically by German language containing a single word for both gift and poison

know it's not rny way; l'd calculated pretty close, though 1 hadn't made out a bill. and I said, one pound thirteen. That was paying for the mater'als and paying me, but none too rnuch, for my work. Th' old Squire looked up at this, and peered in his way at the scteen, and said, "One pound thirteen for a gimcrack like that! Lydia, my dear, if you must spend money on these things, why don't you get them at Rosseter, instead of paying double price for clumsy work here, Such things are not work for a carpenter like Adam. Give him a guinea, and no more. " Well, Miss Lyddy, I reckon, believed what he told her, and she's not over-fond O' parting with the money herself - she's not a bad woman at bottom, but she's been brought up under his thumb: so she began fidgeting with her purse, and turned as red as her ribbon. But I made a bow, and said, "No thank you, madam; l'II make a present O' the screen, if you please. I've charged the regular price for my work, and I know it's done well; and l know, begging his honour's pardon. that you couldn't get such a screen at Rosseter under two guineas. I'm willing to give my work - it's been done in my own time, and nobody's got anything to do with it but me; but if I'm paid, I can't take a smaller price than I asked, because that 'ud be like saying, l'd asked more than was just.' (290)

I quote this episode at length because it shows the strange position Adam

finds himself in his continuing attempts to negotiate his relationship with the

Squire and his family. Adam, while asserting his independence from the

Donnithorne family (and Mr. Burge) by insisting that he does have time of his

own, also describes himself to Bartle as a mernber of the cornmunity willing to

give his time to Miss Lyddy as a gift by not charging money for al1 his time

and fussing over the screen. However, Adam's generosity of spirit is not

taken into account by Mr. Donnithorne, who assumes that Adam is grossly

overcharging for inept work. By not recognising Adam's underlying

generosity, the Squire forces Adam to establish a position of moral superiority

over the Squire by offering the frame as a gift that Miss Lyddy will never be

able to pay back. Furthermore. the Squire's use of the word "gim~rack"'~

here to refer to the screen places his language within the specific vocabulary

surrounding exchangist economy. Reducing the screen to a "gimcrack - a

trivial or worthless knickknack - the squire betrays his inability to recognise or

appreciate Adam's genuine work.

By gesturing towards the town of Rosseter and its supply of cheaper

and apparently better quality goods the Squire further betrays his willingness

to sever his ties to his tenantry by not buying locally and thus failing to enact a

circulation of gifts. As the Emerson quotation at the very beginning of this

chapter suggests, the more mediated and distant an item is from its maker

the less chance it has of being a genuine gift. The fact that Adam, like the

Squire, has been to Rosseter and can offer an opinion of the quality and price

of his work again closes the distance between land-holder and tenantry.

Adam's ability (time) and desire to travel Iike the Squire and his class gives

Adam authority. Paradoxically, as the distance closes between Adam and the

Donnithornes it becomes less and less possible for Adam to give or receive

genuinely. The residuals of feudal culture only allow Adam a space for

critique; just as Adam cannot accept Arthur's offer of friendship, the Squire

cannot accept the screen as a gift. This episode raises the same

complications of the poisonous gift of Arthur's inheritance. Once obligations

and stinginess enter into a transaction, a shift of expression occurs in which

generosity turns into an attempt at mastery.

'O The OED cites Thackeray's use of gimcrack in 1855: "No shops so beautiful to look at as the Brighton gimcrack shops," showing the potentially

Eliot shows that with the dissolution of the feuda1 economy, time

becomes significantly both giveable and representative of expressions or

moments which exceed the cash nexus of bourgeois capitafism. From the

opening banter between Adam and his fellow carpenters, Eliot links the

interaction of time and work with gifts. Adam chastises his fellow workers for

reducing their work to an exchangist transaction:

'Look there, now! I can't abide to see men throw away their tools 1' that way, the minute the dock begins to strike, as if they took no pleasure I' the work, and was afraid O' doing a stroke too much.'

' Ay, ay, Adam lad, ye talk like a young un. When y' are six an' forty like me, istid O' six an' twenty, ye wonna be so flush O' workin' for nought.'

Nonsense,' said Adam, still wrathful; 'what's age got to do with it, I wonder? Ye arena getting stiff yet, I reckon. I hate to see a man's arms drop down as if he was shot, before the ciock's fairly struck, just as if he'd never a bit O' pride and delight in 's work. The very grindstone 'ull go on turning a bit after you loose it.' (55)

Distanced from the feudal economy, Adam adopts some of the freedoms

implied wiïhin capital economy. As a carpenter he is a free agent. less tied to

the land so that he contemplates ways to earn money which do not directly

link him to the Squire. Adam's time does becorne worth more than the men

working for him; after he assumes control of both the woods and Mr. Burge's

business, he rides a horse rather than walking. Eliot, however, is careful to

distinguish Adam from his boss, Jonathan Burge, who not unlike the squire,

has an "inward scorn of al1 knowingness that could not be turned into cash"

(240). Through Adam. Eliot begins to explore the ways in which judgement

solely based on the cash nexus renders a limited or shallow reading of the

relationships between members of a community. Furthermore, by attempting

Emersonian apologetic nature of gimcracks.

to instill a sense of generosity into an exchangist economy, Adam

demonstrates that gift-giving is no longer only the province or the duty of the

aristocracy but a practice potentially adopted by al1 people who have a sense

of having work which engages them not just economically but communaily

and communicatively.

While Adam possesses a freedorn of time and movement more

suggestive of a capitalist economy than a feudal economy, Eliot's delineation

of the Methodist preacher Dinah Morris provides Adam Bede with a

representation of generosity removed ftom the values of industrial capitalism.

Dinah's religious practices show the workings of a generous economy based

on faith which operates differently than a feudal econorny, an exchangist

economy or Adam's generosity-infused capitalism. Dinah sees the money

her industrial labour in the factory at Snowfield provides her as part of the

work given to her by God. Dinah believes her work is transcendental

because it is inspired by her faith. In fact, Dinah views it as a gift:

Frorn her girl-hood upwards she had had experience among the sick and the mourning, among minds hardened and shrivelled through poverty and ignorance, and had gained the subtlest perception of the mode in which they could best be touched, and softened into willingness to receive words of spiritual consolation or warning. As Dinah expressed it, 'She was never left to herself; but it was always given to her when to keep silence and when to speak.' And do we not al1 agree to cal1 rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration? After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still Say, as Dinah did, that ouf highest thoughts and ouf best deeds are al1 given to us. (1 58-59)

Eliot first offers a rational explanation of Dinah's inspiration only to imply that

any attempts to account or explain generosity or sympathy in rational terms

would be futile.

Dinah gives her time and money, with no thought to reserve, in an

attempt to refashion and reinvest generosity and expenditure into industrial

capitalism. Utility and luxury do not form a binary opposition within Eliot's

narratives, just as capitalism and feudalism do not. Mrs. Poyser wonders how

Dinah can justify squandering her time and affections on people not directly

related to her. Indeed, as the narrator notes, religion seems luxurious to

those committed to the day ta day workings of a farm:

Alick was of opinion that church, like other luxuries, was not to be indulged in often by a foreman who had the weather and the ewes on his mind. 'Church! Nay - I'n gotten summat else to think on,' was an answer which he often uttered in a tone of bitter significance that silenced further question. I feel sure Alick meant no irreverence; indeed, I know that his mind was not of a speculative, negative caste, and he would on no account have missed going to church on Christmas Day, Easter Sunday, and Whissuntide. But he had a general impression that public worship and religious ceremony, Iike other non-productive employments, were intended for people who had leisure. (232)

Dinah's faith is misunderstood by the majority of the characters within Adam

Bede. Eliot implies a number of times within Adam Bede that Methodism

appeals more to communities in which the feudal system is no longer in

place. Dinah tells Mr. Invine:

'I've noticed, that in these villages where the people lead a quiet life among the green pastures and the still waters, tilling the ground and tending the cattle, there's a strange deadness to the Word, as different as c m be from the great towns, like Leeds, where I once went to visit a holy woman who preaches there. It's wonderful how rich is the harvest of souk up those high-wafled streets, where you seem ta walk as in a

prison-yard, and the ear is deafened with the sounds of worldly toil. I think maybe it is because the promise is sweeter when this life is so dark and dreary, and the sou1 gets more hungry when the body is il1 at ease.' (137)

Dinah senses that the exchangist economics supported by capitalism cannot

meet the full range of human needs. She expresses her desire to leave the

cornforts of the Poyser farm, with its vestiges of feudal generosity, in order to

return to the mining town of Snowfield where the residents have little

evidence that an economy of generosity exists. Her example of and claims of

the necessity of generosity within human community parallel Bataille's

observation that universal expenditure has often manifested itself within the

passions and sacrifices of religious conviction. She gives pieces of herself,

not out of a sense of obligation or in hopes of material gain but in hopes of

cultivating a generosity of spirit. Her gift of care and time to Hetty in prison

eclipses any monetary or cammodity exchanges within the narrative because

it cornes closest to encapsulating Emerson's sense that "the only gift is a

portion of thyself' (376).

The notion that gifts should corne from a place close to, if not a part of,

the giver creates an etiquette of giving rooted in primary social structures.

Within these definitions it can be said that Adam Bede contains no feudal

aristocracy, only the vestiges of traditions and rituals which, while still holding

some value and enacting some exchanges, have lost their moorings in a

complete social and moral fabricating economy because they no longer

contain the workings of generosity. By infusing Carlyle's transcendental

conception of work with Emerson's notion of true gifts as necessarily being

closely representative of the giver, Eliot sketches an emergent social

structure in which the potential for the gift rests, not just within the upper

classes but within individual people who take up work that demonstrates their

comrnitment to an economy of generosity. In this sense, Eliot shows that the

emerging bourgeois economic terms and expectations do not provide a

complete vocabulary or conceptual schema for communicating or enacting

the presence of genuine gifts.

The impetus to give, shown in a number of different characters both

inside and outside the feudal system, c m not be easily negotiated within the

changing relationships depicted in Adam Bede. Without the feudal channels

to temper and control the underlying force of expenditure, gifts can become

fatally poisonous, producing an entirely different kind of waste and sacrifice.

As Arthur realises that he will not be able to remain within Hayslope, Dinah

becomes a permanent resident. Eliot replaces his fading ability to expend

benevolently with Adam and Dinah's more effective capacity to give within

context. Eliot makes this exchange more obvious with Arthur's gift of

departure marked by his gift of the watch to Dinah symbolising the eclipse of

exchange by a gift of time. Bataille argues that the capitalist narratives of

economy fail to account for expenditure, making the recognition of gifts or

generosity impossible. He contends that economy should be conceived, not

in terms of capitalism's sense of lack or limited production and accumulation

but in terms of waste, surplus and excessive discursive exchange. Similarly,

the narrator of Adam Bede suggests: "it is possible, thank Heaven! to have

very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon which

cIumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store, that she may carry it to her

neighbor's child to 'stop the fits,' may be a piteously inefficacious remedy; but

the generous stirring of neighborly kindness that prompted the deed, has a

beneficent radiation that is not lost" (82). As I will demonstrate in my next

chapter on Mill on the Floss, Eliot shows that the energies which perpetuate

genuine gifts and generosity continue to interrupt the profit-calculated

hoardings of exchangist economics.

CHAPTER TVVO

Benevolent Vengeance and Wasteful Prodigality: Gifts Which Can Not Help But Give In The Mill on the Floss

instead of the waning feudalism of the eighteenth century that is the setting

for Adam Bede, Eliot sets the MiIl on the Floss firmly within the machinations

of the profit-oriented middle class of a growing town. With neither a residue

of generosity remaining from the feudal system nor the expenditures of

religion', the citizens of St. Ogg's appear deeply immersed in Mammonism.

The giving of a genuine gift under these circurnstances becomes almost

impossible. As Emerson notes, when people begin to feel adversarial, a gift

can be given and received as an act of hostility:

The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires careful sailing, or rude boats. It is not the office of man to receive gifts. How dare you give them? We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecorning. Some violence, I think, is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported; and if the gift pleases me over much, then I

' In his article "Ontogeny and Phylogeny in The Mill on the Floss," Preston Fambrough situates the novel within Eliot's belief that Christianity had become ernpty ritual : "Like her fellow agnostic John Stuart Mill, George Eliot admired the potential of the Christian religion at its best to inspire self- transcending ecthusiasrn, but lamented the deterioration of Christianity in her own day into empty ritualism. In The Mill on the Floss. the narrator refleds that "'The days were gone when men could be greatly wrought upon by their faith"' (83).

should be ashamed that the donor should read my heart, and see that I love his commodity, and not him. (26)

A gift, when not given or received generously. suggests a kind of dependency

that may cause rifts or violence in relationships not already based on a kind of

mutuality. Because of George Eliot's use of water imagery, Emerson's

distinction between careful sailing and rude boats seems particularly apt for a

discussion of Mill on the Floss. As I discussed within Adam Bede, without a

clear etiquette for the giving and receiving of gifts, the potential for

untempered generosity to go awry escalates. Eliot continues her quest for a

new ethics of giving by representing the course of both "uncareful" sailing and

"rude boats." I make a distinction from Emerson, here, in my alteration of

"careful sailing" to "uncareful sailing," in order to suggest the lack of

generosity exhibited by those affdiated with Marnmonism, for they do not give

genuine gifts.

The violence and harm of the exchangist economy embraced by the

majority of the characters within the worfd of St Ogg's shows the ways in

which gifts can be used as weapons to control and humiliate. In Past and

Present Carlyle paints a bleak portrait of an industrialised England steeped in

a pervasive Mammonism suggestive of the "uncareful sailing" of which

Emerson speaks:

True, it must be owned, we for the present, with out Mammon-Gospel, have corne to strange conclusions. We cal1 it a Society; and go about professing openly the totallest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-ofcwar, named "fair cornpetition" and so forth, it is mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole

relation of human being; we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates al1 engagements of man. (1 52)

The capital channels of St. Oggs allow for exchanges which have the

appearance of genuine gifts. As holder of significant capital within town, Mr.

Wakem performs the most public "uncareful sailings" of Mamrnonism in Mill

on the Floss. He performs acts of charity in order to humiliate and enact

revenge. As he contemplates the purchase of Dorlcote Mill, Mr. Wakem

considers the satisfaction of placing someone in debt in the name of charity

while still managing to turn a profit. Charity in this instance is actually an

investment because it has very specific expectations of return:

To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing hirn humiiiated by your benevolent action or concession on his behalf. mat is the sort of revenge which falls into the sa le of virtue, and Wakem was not without an intention of keeping that scale respectably filled. He had once had the pleasure of putting an old enemy of his into one of the St Ogg's alms-houses. to the rebuilding of which he had given a large subscription; and here was an opportunity of providing for another by making him his own servant. Such things give cornpleteness to prosperity, and contribute elements of agreeable consciousness that are not dreamed of by that short-sighted, over- heated vindictiveness, which goes out of its way to wreak itself in direct inquiry. And Tulliver, with his rough tongue filed by a sense of obligation, would rnake a better servant than any chance fellow who was cap-in-hand for a situation. (253)

With the cornmodification and commercialisation of Mammonisrn, a

counterfeit generosity, intended to limit the freedom and happiness of the

receiver, occurs. Mr. Wakem refers to this form of giving paradoxically as

"benevolent vengeance," demonstrating the difficulty of distinguishing

sometimes between "careful sailing" and "uncareful sailing" (Emerson 253).

Throughout the Mill on the Floss, Eliot complicates giving by allowing her

narrative to linger on the intentions of the giver. M a t becomes important in

distinguishing a genuine gift from other foms of giving is what kind of

response is dernanded or expected by the giver. How does the motive for the

giving of a gift affect its reception and in what ways can the reception of a gift

be controlled? Can a gift which demands a specific kind of response be a

genuine gift? How do displays of gratitude or expectations of gratitude

complicate gift-giving? In the case of Mr. Wakem above, he expects that Mr.

Tulliver's sense of gratitude will make him more easy to control, but as

Emerson points out, the ideal of self-sufficiency invested in profit-loss

economics often leads to violent resentment. As Eliot shows within Mill on

the Floss, Mr. Wakem's act of benevolent vengeance creates a vendetta that

destroys opportunities for happiness in both families. The significance placed

upon unpaid debts in a Mammonist conception of reality allows those

participating in it to harm each other irrevocably. "Uncareful sailing" then, in

the difficuit channels of the law of benefits, does not spend with generosity; it

embarks without considering the happiness or desires of others, somehow

believing that the happiness of others has no material (Le. calculable) affect.

As Genevieve Vaughan makes clear in Forgiving: A Feminist

Cnticism of Exchange, the distinction between exchangist economy and

generous economy is that exchangism "is giving in order to receive" (30).

The transcendental generosity that Eliot invests in work within Adam Bede is

transferred to a separate economy of genuine gifts and forgiveness within Mill

on the Floss. Through her portrayal of ~ a g g i e ~ . Eliot implies that nature. like

true gifts, has an inherent generosity that spends without calculation.

Genuine gifts corne to represent an economy founded on sentiment, affection

and love that offers a keen contrast to the exchangist economy of St. Ogg's.

This separate economy of gifts and exchanges cannot be rewgnised,

integrated or valued by the purveyors of Mammonisrn. From one of the

earliest interchanges between Tom and Maggie, the incommensurability of

the two systems becomes evident.

" 1 know what Latin is very well," said Maggie, confidently. "Latin's a language. There are Latin words in the Dictionary. There's bonus, a gift." "Now, you're just wrong there, Miss Maggie!" said Tom, secretly astonished. "You think you're very wise! But 'bonus' means 'good,' as it happens - bonus, bona, bonum." "Well, that's no reason why it shouldn't mean 'gift,"' said Maggie, stoutly. "It may mean several things - almost every word does." (145)

For my purposes, it can be no accident that Eliot chooses the words 'gift' and

'good' to demonstrate the potential prodigality of language and gifts.

Maggie's perception that words and gifts can have many meanings speaks to

the complexity of every instance of gift giving. As this passage implies, there

is the potential for a gift to be not just positive or negative, but ta exceed

qualitative and quantitative evaluation. Words, like gifts, do not have a single

referent. Tom's astonishment at Maggie's declaration offers a rnicrocosm of

Many different systems of metaphors have been used to describe both how Maggie is different from the other characters of St. Oggs, and what her difference means. Much of the recent feminist criticism on Eliot's work posits Maggie as a manifestation of unrealised, unrecognised and unvalued (debatably ferninine) potential within her environment. See (not exclusively) Gillian Beef s George Eliot, Nina Auerbach's Woman and the Demon: The

the responses Maggie continuously garners from those around her. To refer

back to the terms of the Emerson quotation, Maggie is Eliot's "rude boat" or

aleatory gift of the narrative. Often clumsy and ill-equipped to meet the

expectations of her relations, Maggie disrupts the acwunting sails of their

"uncareful saiiings." She, like Hetty. cannot participate as an agent within a

market economy; however, she does continually provide other characters with

opportunities to give genuine gifts which exceed the exchangist mentality.

Unlike Hetty, Maggie creates and supports a separate econorny of genuine

gifts within the narrative which runs counter to the narrow financial and rigid

obligation-creating ties which her relationships with her aunts, uncles, and

brother continually turn on.

From the beginning of the narrative, Eliot aligns Maggie with

notions of prodigality: both the prodigality of nature and the biblical gift-giving

parable of the prodigal son. Maggie's quixotic nature, because linked to

prodigality, represents a kind of "rude boat," pulled and tossed by the law of

benefits dictated by her specific set of circumstances - "rude" because her

gifts, like Arthur's in Adam Bede, often have a destructive quality. If

unrecognised by those around her, Maggie's need to love and be loved often

leads to her excessive emotional and physical outbursts. Eliot atternpts to

provide some rational or scientific explanations for Maggie's prodigality within

the Mill on the Floss by associating her with movements and forces beyond

the reasoning, harnessing or adaptations of society, placing her narrative into

Life of a Victorian Myth, and Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing.

the discourses surrounding the excesses of nature during the period. Eliot

ironises Herbert Spencer's ability to reject or ignore the anomalies of nature

that did not fit into the explanatory systems of his studies. In a letter to Sara

Hennell in 1852, she relates " 1 went to Kew yesterday on a scientific

expedition with Herbert Spencer, who has al1 sorts of theories about plants- l

should have said a proof-hunting expedition. Of course, if the flowers didn't

correspond to the theories, we said, 'tant pis pour les fleurs."' (2, 40)? As

material flowers do not meet Spencer's theoretical flowers, Maggie and gifts

do not meet the calculations of exchangist conceptions of economy.

Pursuing his interest in the sciences, Eliot's partner, George Henry

Lewes, wrote an article for the Fotfnightly Review in which he continues to

explore his fascination for the "wasteful prodigality" of nature:

The prodigality of the nature of waste is far more conspicuous than the wise economy of which so much is said; no one would applaud the wisdom and skill of a man who wasted a pipe of wine every tirne he desired to fiIl a glass. It must strike every reflective mind as humanly speaking strangely at variance with a wise vision of ends that structures so marvelously wmplex and capable of so complete an existence as those of man and animals should be formed by m'Il' I ions under conditions which prevent their development; not only are ova sacrificed by millions, but even when the ova have been fertilised this 'end' is frustrated - the embryo perishes, the infant perishes, the child perishes, the youth perishes, and the organisations we are called upon to marvel at as a work of 'exquisite contrivance,' attains its 'end' as an exception to the general failure.. . . Design, contrivance, skill, are phrases to denote human, not Divine, agencies. (41 )

Lewes, influenced by Darwin, notes that notions of conservation and utilitarian

thought do not reflect the underpinnings of nature which expends and wastes

f n George Eliot: An lntellectual Life, Valerie Dodd offers a more detailed narrative of Eliot's response to Spencer's "rernoteness from the tangled,

without thought and without telos4. Maggie's conspicuous waste is only

assigned a value by those around her. The proliferation of nature does not

just apply to Maggie either. The narrator of Mill on the Floss applies the same

kind of multiplicity and even genericness to Tom by contending that nature

tums out lads by the gross and that Tom is "one of those lads that grow

everywhere in England" (33).

Maggte's inability to be properly useful to those around her does not

refer to any ultimate model of utility. As Bataille suggests, in "The Notion of

Expenditure," bourgeois capitalism does not account for the underlying waste

in nature that extends to human interaction. Those who populate the world of

St. Ogg's represent, not Spencer's "survival of the fittest," but the survival of

the survivors. Eliot uses the unproductive expenditures represented by

Maggie as part of a larger narrative response to the getting and spending of

St. Ogg's. By foregrounding Maggie as "a small mistake of nature,"

containing the exuberance and uncontrollability of nature, Eliot juxtaposes her

to the stringent confines of the material and monetary hoarding of her

relations. Maggie's father5. very early in the narrative, sets out both of these

concrete detail of a cornplex world, and the over-theoretical nature of his rnind" (1 75). ' Emerson, as well, makes a connection between nature and gifts. "Flowers and fruit are always fit presents; fiowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues al1 the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat Stern countenance of ordinary nature: they are like music heard out of a workhouse. Nature does not cocker us: we are children, not pets: she is not fond: everything is dealt to us without fear or favour, after several universal laws. Yet these delicate fiowers look Iike the frol ic and interference of love and beauty" (374-375).

AS a miller, Mr. Tulliver occupies as curious a position within St Ogg's as Adam Bede and Arthur Donnithorne do within Hayslope. Eliot implies that his

associations: "It's no mischief much while she's a little un, but an over - cute

woman's no better nor a long-tailed sheep - she'll fetch none the bigger p r i e

for that" (12). When considering Maggie's intelligence, Mr. Tulliver

automatically considers its monetary utility within the framework of biological

anomaly: as far as he is concerned, because Maggie is a woman her

inheritance of intelligence is a waste.

Maggie's prodigal biological inheritance is markedly different from the

other narrative of prodigality that informs the economy of generosity in Mill on

the Floss. On a visit to Luke's. Maggie becomes absorbed in a

representation of the bible story of the Prodigal son from the book of Luke:

"l'm glad his father took him back again- aren't you, Luke?" she said. "For he was very sorry, you know, and wouldn't do wrong again." "Eh, Miss," said Luke, "He'd be no great shakes, 1 doubt, let's feyther do what he would for him." That was a painful thought to Maggie, and she wished much that the subsequent history of the young man had not been left a blank. (32)

Far from ieaving the future of the prodigal son blank, Mill on the Floss

reconfigures the parable of gift giving in terms of a prodigal daughter who

returns home again and again seeking the ideal expenditure of forgiveness

associated with the familial relationship represented within the bible story6.

business difficulties are a result of his inability to fully adopt an exchangist economy. He does however have a sense of the changes that may be necessary as his decision to educate Tom for business suggests. Unfortunately, for him and Tom. his choice of a gentlemanly education. does not prove as useful as he anticipated.

In Luke, Jesus recounts the story of the prodigal son in order to highlight the importance of repentance. "A certain man had two sons; and the younger of them said to his father, 'Father give me the share of the estate that falls to me.' And he divided his wealth between them. And not many days later, the younger son gathered everything together and went on a journey into a distant country, and there he squandered his estate with loose living. Now

By using the story to inform the layers of gifts within the narrative. Eliot

demonstrates that unprodudive expenditure and waste provide opportunity

for comrnunity and forgiveness. Forgiveness can act as a genuine gift for

both the giver and the receiver simultaneously. The prodigal son wastes his

inheritance only to return home to provide the irnpetus for a feast. In this

instance, the sorrow the prodigal son feels at his waste becomes mirrored

and reversed in the resulting celebration. More complicated than the Biblical

account of prodigatity, Eliot's account invests Maggie's story with the

prodigality of biological inheritance, making her inheritance a waste within the

utilitarian Iimits and possibilities of a miller's daughter. Maggie must

apologise her entire life for the squandering of an inheritance over which she

had no control. Like the prodigal son, Maggie returns home the first time after

running away to live with the gypsies fearing punishment and retribution.

60th her unwillingness to be blamed for impulsively pushing Lucy in the mud

and her ability to construct elaborate narratives for herself - a manifestation

of her wasted quickness - lead her to imagine and attempt to set herself up

- - - - -

when he had spent everything, a severe famine occurred in that country, and he began to be in need. And he went and attached himself to one of the citizens of that country, and he began to be in need. And he was longing to fiIl his stomach with the pods that the swine were eating, and no one was giving anything to hirn, But when he came to his senses, he said, "How many of my father's hired men have more than enough bread, but I am dying here with hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and will say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me as one of your hired men.' And he got up and came to his father. But while he was still along way off, his father saw him, and embraced him, and kissed him. And the son said to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' But the father said to his slaves, 'Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him,

as a benevolent philosopher queen of the gypsies. Although he recognises

that she exceeds the necessities of her position, Mr. Tuliiver cannot

contemplate her loss; Maggie is neither scolded nor punished for her

indiscretion.

Maggie's 'squanderings' continue to be a source of puzzlement for the

Marnmonists of St. Ogg's, who can only think that Maggie has no sense of

her obligation to them. The market transactions of commodities and concern

for interest and profit limit the ways in which the people of St. Oggs can

interact with one another. As the narrator tells us after Lucy's discussion with

her father over the ownership of the Mill reverting back into the Tulliver name,

"to men of Mr. Deane's stamp, what goes on among the young people is as

extraneous to the real business of life as what goes on among the birds and

butterfiies- until it can be shown to have a malign bearing on monetary affairs"

(429). Mrs. Glegg gives away the inconsistencies of her philosophy of giving

when she refuses to allow that circumstance often interrupts calculation. She

does not believe that she should give to those who have been wasteful (214)

and yet is willing to enertain the notion that " a judgement had fallen on Mr.

Tulliver, which would be an impiety to counteract by too much kindness"

(200). The Gleggs and the Deanes extend the rnonetary metaphors of credit

and debit into al1 of their exchanges. Maggie's farnily will invest or perform

generously only if they are certain of return. The loan of funds opens a

channel for another set of values. During the family meeting concerning

and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet; and bring the fattened calf, kill it and, and let us eat and be rnerry. (Luke 15.1 1-23)

Tom's education, Mrs. Glegg implies she has a right to an opinion about

Tom's education because she has loaned Mr.Tulliver money:

"O, I Say nothing," said Mrs. Glegg, sarcastically. "My advice has never been asked, and I don1 give it." " It'll be the first time, then," said Mr. Tultiver. " It's the only thing you're over-ready at giving." "l've been over-ready at lending, then, if I haven't been over-ready at givingln said Mrs. Glegg. "There's folks I've lent rnoney to. as pemaps I shall repent O' lending money to kin." "Corne, come. come," said Mr. Glegg, soothingly. But Mr. Tulliver was not to be hindered by his retort. "You've got a bond for it, l reckon," he said; "and you've had your five percent, kin or no kin." (72-3)

Mrs. Glegg does not give without the expectation of gratitude: a gratitude

which demands interest, both in opinion and finance. Because of these

binding obligations, the familial relationships, which in Maggie's mind should

be based on generosity and love, only deepen the insidious power created by

monetary favours. lnstead of being thankful of the opportunity to give to

someone in need. the Gleggs and Deanes deem the loaning of money to

family a patronising act of charity.

In Maggie's estimation to place blame is the worst form of benevolent

vengeance. After her father loses the miIl and falls ill, she rails against her

relations for coming to visit under the pretense of providing wmfort only ta

place blame:

"Why do you come, then," she burst out, "talking and interfering with us and scolding us, if you don't mean to do anything to hetp my poor mother - your own sister - if you've no feeling for her when she's in trouble, and won't part with anything, though you would never miss it, to save her frorn pain? Keep away frorn us then, and don? come to find fault with my father - he was better than any of you - he was kind - he would have helped you, if you had b e n in trouble. Tom and I don't

ever want to have any our your money, if you won't help my mother. We'd rather not have it! We'll do without you." Maggie, having hurled her defiance at aunts and uncles in this way, stood still, with her large dark eyes glaring at them, as if she were ready to await ail consequence. Mrs. Tulliver was frightened; there was something portentous in this mad outbreak; she did not see how life could go on after it. Tom was vexed; it was no use to talk so. The aunts were silent with surprise for some moments. At length, in a case of aberration such as this, comment presented itself as more expedient than any answer. "You haven't seen the end O' your trouble wi' that child, Bessy," said Mrs. Pullet; "She's beyond everything for boldness and unthankfulness. It's dreadful. I might ha' let alone paying for her schooling, for sheJs worse nor ever." (21 5)

To place blame is to believe in the terms of exchangist economy in which

causality and fortune are predictable and fair.

Even as a child, Tom recognizes that with Maggie there can be no

predictions of future happenings - only the "wait and see" of anticipation or

dread. In her depiction of Tom and Maggie's childhood, Eliot wntrasts

Maggie's irnpetuous generosity with Tom's notion of strict justice. When Tom

returns home from school early in the narrative to find that Maggie has

neglected to feed his rabbits, he will not forgive her, despite her sorrow and

obvious adoration of him:

"You're a naughty girl," said Tom severely, "and I'm sorry I bought you the fish-iine. I don? love you."

"O, Tom, it's very cruel," sobbed Maggie. "I'd forgive you, if you forgot anything - I wouldn't mind what you did - I'd forgive you and love you." "Yes, you're a silty - but I never do farget things - I don't."

"O. please forgive me, Tom; my heart will break," said Maggie shaking with sobs, clinging to Tom's arm, and laying her wet cheek on his shoulder. (36)

Tom's love for Maggie is a kind of benevolent vengeance. As she grows

older, Maggie continues to have difficulty with Tom's impervious nature, which

will not allow a gift to stand without an attempt at reciprocity, or in her case

Tom's inability to accept that she c m be anything more than a responsibility

that he ought to take care of. Maggie has nothing to offer Tom that he holds

valuable. Tom continually punishes her when she atternpts to give to him.

When she bemoacs that she did not take book-keeping at schooi so that she

could teach him, Tom denies that she can teach him anything of worth. The

incommensurability of their two economies once again becornes clear:

"You often think I'm conceited, Tom, when I donJt mean what I say at al1 in that way. I don't rnean to put myself above you - I know you behaved better than me yesterday. But you are always so harsh to me, Tom." With the fast words the resentment was rising again. "No, I'rn not harsh," said Tom, with severe decision. "l'm always kind

to you; and so I shall be: I shall always take care of you. But you must mind what I say." Their mother came in now, and Maggie rushed away, that her bunt of tears, which she felt must corne, might not happen till she was safe up- stairs. They were very bitter tears: everybody in the world seemed so hard and unkind to Maggie: there was no indulgence, no fondness, such as she imagined when she fashioned the world afresh in her own thoughts. (235)

Later Tom is unable to trust Maggie based on the prodigality of her nature; he

will not invest trust in a wager he is uncertain of the return on: "1 never feel

certain about anything with you" (393). The difierence in the way Maggie

wishes to, or arguably must, relate to others proves uncreditable to those who

do not recognise her value.

Maggie signifies ail the dangers and hopes of a gift giving economy:

her reception by others becomes key to the distinction between gift giving and

exchange within the narrative. As in the parable of the prodigal son, remorse

and struggle count and account within an economy of generosity. Tom's idea

of what Maggie needs does not take into account Maggie's own conceptions

of what she needs. Throughout the story, Tom's love for Maggie depends on

a set of exchanges and conditions placing it into the exchangist economy of

town life rather than the generous economy associated with Maggie's

movements. Recognising the kind of conditions placed on her by accepting

Tom's care, Maggie chooses to leave home after her father's death rather

than iive within his conditions.

Eliot shows those who are able to recognise Maggie's value, outside of

obligatory relationships, also have the ability to participate within a gift-giving

paradigm. While we may conjecture that it is a very rich society which can

afford to support the prodigal squanderings of its citizens, Eliot shows that

monetary wealth does not necessarily form a direct correlation with

benevolence. Writing of Eliot's fiction as upholding a new poetry of

comrnunity, Suzanne Graver notes that Eliot's exploration of the Iimits of

needs reveals "that a poetry based on primitive simplicity of wants can meet

only in a limited way the needs of people living in a cornplex societyn (1 14).

The incommensurability of the two economies within Mill on the Floss results

from the existence of different needs. The auctioning of al1 of the TuIliver's

furniture, luxurious and momentous, bears this out. Anything which will

provide comfort or sense of identity, from books to china, is sald off. The gifts

within Mill on the Floss show not only that individuals have different needs

from those dictated by those who have control over them, but that attempts to

recognise and then meet these needs can be difficult.

Those who participate in Maggie's economy have needs not met by

the market economy of St. Ogg's. Their memories are keyed into what

Vaughan refers to as the gift-giving paradigm which emphasizes the

importance of giving to satisfy needs:

It is need-oriented rather than profit oriented, free gift giving to needs- what in mothering we cal1 nurturing or caring work- is often not counted and may remain invisible in our society or seem uninformative because it is qualitatively rather than quantitatively based. However, giving to needs creates bonds between givers and receivers. Recognising sorneone's need, and acting to satisfy it, convinces the giver of the existence of the other, while receiving something from someone else that satisfies a need proves the existence of the other to the receiver. (30)

A generous economy, then, has a sense of mutuality between the giver and

the receiver that begins with a perception of extravagance on the part of the

receiver that creates a momentous memory, forming a synergistic relationship

of giving. The reception of a gift cannot always be anticipated or controlled.

Like gifts, Maggie occasions events. I Say 'occasions' because there is a

sense in which Maggie's prodigality creates a vortex of generosity. We often

sustain and create occasions with gifts. While the materiality of the gift

disappears or fades, the energy or memories created by events and gifts do

not. Maggie frequently provokes or allows people opportunities to be

generous or forgiving; whether or not they choose to take into account her

needs distinguishes those who participate in a generous economy from those

who participate in an exchangist economy.

The packman Bob Jakin participates in both ewnomies within The Mill

on the Floss. He has the ability to recognise the purveyors of both economies

and plays by the separate rules of each. He contends "If a chap gives me

one black eye, that's enough for me: I shan't ax him for another afore I sarve

him out; an' a good turn's worth as much as a bad un, anyhow" (239). Bob's

statement points to one of the major difficulties of distinguishing a gift from

other methods of exchange (often manifested in cammodity circulation). He

notes that not only do good turns and bad turns affect people equally but that

often they both demand some kind of reciprocity. If good and bad tums affect

equally, the ability to distinguish a good turn from a bad turn becomes a

necessary of those who need to navigate the channels of exchange. Just as

bad tums can create a memory bent on vengeance, good tums can create

memories that sustain generosity. Eliot dernonstrates that giving creates a

siynificant mernory in the receiver. Even in the rejection of a genuine gift,

there is the acknowledgement of generosity. The giving of a genuine gift

often begins a friendship, leaving a trace of generosity which sustains it. This

becomes apparent in the earliest attempt on Bob's part ta give Tom and

Maggie a chance at recovering their social and financial position within St.

Ogg's by offering them the nine guineas he has "luckedn into. m i l e Tom

refuses the offered money, the trace of generosity instigates and sustains a

link between the two families which exceeds a business relationship. Maggie

and Tom both accept that Bob spends time considering their fortunes. By

"fortunes" I mean to suggest both the monetary independence of the Tullivers

but also the sense that fortune implies the future and hence a continuing

relationship that is not caught within the measuring of each exchange for

reciprocity.

Long forgotten by Tom, 80b remembers Tom's gift of a knife to

him in their childhood which offered him a different and perhaps ideal way of

moving through the world. He recognizes a significant difference between

Tom's gesture towards him and how the rest of the world treats him: " An'

there was niver nobody else gen me nothin' but what 1 got by my own

sharpness, only you, Mr Tom" (238). In this instance the gift functions as a

kind of replication rather than reciprocation for there is no "balancing" of

accounts. Their relationships with Bob highlight the inimical difference

between Maggie and Tom in the way that their individual memories operate.

Tom forgets the gift of the knife which Bob bases his conception of their

relationship upon. For Tom there is "no part of his acquaintance with Bob that

he remembered better than the cause of their parting quarrel" in which he

rejected Bob for breaking his word (238).

While Tom refuses the gift of the sovereigns with some

embarrassment, Maggie understands more fully that Bob's willingness to

adopt a generous economy with the Tullivers must be made more explicit.

Bob, diswntented, fears that it might appear as if he has visited Tom in order

to show off his good fortune. Maggie gives Bob what he needs in this

instance: a declaration of friendship based on an open invitation to

communication based on need. "'If ever Tom or my father wants help that

you can give, we'll let you know- won? we, Tom? That's what you would like - to have us always depend on you as a friend that we can go to - isn't it Bob?'"

(242).

Bob continues to play a significant role in Maggie and Tom's life.

After witnessing Maggie's sorrow at the selling of her father's library, Bob

returns to the miIl with a bundle of books for Maggie. In this episode, Eliot

explores the complications of reception inherent within gift-giving. The

treatment of books within Mill on the Floss allows for an extended

consideration of Eliot's beliefs that texts can shape and affect people within

the framework of the gifl. Characters within Mill on the Floss engage with

books on two very different levels, much Iike the two ecbnomies within the

narrative. Mr. Tulliver buys his library because of the integrity of the binding.

for the soundness of the materiality of the books rather than what they might

convey or affect. Bob, too, treats the books he brings Maggie with little

concern for content. One book is much Iike another in both these instances;

they are commodities to be possessed or traded as necessity dictates. As

Eliot already demonstrates with the poison gifts within Adam Bede, gifts given

spontaneously and with good intentions often cause destruction.

Books, however, once read, or received in the instance of a gift,

potentially cause an expansion of possibilities and choices. Maggie, starving

for stimulation both intellectually and sentimentally, accepts the books

(materially and sentirnentally) and then goes on to digest and enact them

intellectually. While Bob attempts to meet MaggieJs needs with his gtft books.

language like gifts has unpredictable consequences. VVhen considering

Eliot's politics of literature, the representation of this gift trajectory in the

formation of the relationships within Mill on the Floss lends itself to the

continuing replication of an ethics of giving. Maggie's adoption of Thomas à

Kempis's teachings in The Imitations of Christ, one of the books Bob brings,

leads her into a life of selfdenial in which the needs and expectations of

others take priority over her own. Although Bob does not see the extended

intellectual consequences of his gift to Maggie, the ties of generosity created

by the books do provide Bob with other opportunities to validate Maggie's

presence. After Tom refuses to allow Maggie to come home, she finds

shelter and comfort with Bob's family. Ever aware of the integrity of Maggie,

Bob continues to wish for Maggie's direct influence in his Iife. He

demonstrates this wish through his desire for Maggie to hold his child which is

named after her, for "it 'ud be better for your takin' a bit O' notice on it"' (487).

Like Bob's, Maggie's memory tends to remember genuine gifts and

acts of generosity. Once a benevolent act occurs, al1 of Maggie's thoughts

and actions become filtered through its memory. allowing her to forgive any

acts of willful stinginess in a way that Tom is not capable of. When Mrs.

Tulliver criticizes Mr. Tulliver's lack of prudence, Maggie recalls his generosity

in a rush of emotion:

Maggie, almost choked with mingled grief and anger, lefl the room, and took her old place on her father's bed. Her heart went out to him with a stronger movement then ever, at the thought that people would blame him. Maggie hated blame: she had been blamed al1 her life, and nothing had come of it but evil tempers. Her father had always defended her and excused her, and her loving remembrance of his

tenderness was a force within her that would enable her to do or bear anything for his sake. (205)

Maggie founds the loyalty of her relationships with both her father and Philip

on very early acts of generosity towards her or her family. As well, on a

number of occasions, Maggie justifies her relationship to Philip by

rernembering his kindness towards Tom during the time he cuts his foot with

a sword in childhood.

Maggie's relationship with Philip follows a similar pattern of gifts based

on a recognition of needs. Philip is drawn to Maggie because "her eyes were

full of unsatisfied intelligence, and unsatisfied, beseeching affection" (1 78)

and as the narrator tells us, Maggie has an inclination towards creatures who

will accept and appreciate her tenderness (1 77). Philip's ability to participate

within the gift-giving paradigm exemplified by Maggie continues to grow and

finally manifests itself within his letter of forgiveness and continuing love and

loyalty to Maggie:

The new life I have found in caring for your joy and sorrow more than for what is directly my own, has transformed the spirit of rebellious murmuring into that willing endurance which is the birth of strong sympathy. I think nothing but such cornpiete and intense love could have initiated me into that enlarged life which grows and grows by appropriating the life of others; for before, I was always dragged back from it by ever-present painful self-consciousness. 1 even think sornetimes that this gift of transferred Iife which has come to me in loving you, may be a new power to me. (503)

Maggie's ability to force people to consider her needs and attempt to meet

them instigates Philip's articulation of the difference between exchangist and

generous economies. As Philip confesses his love for Maggie to his father in

hopes that he will help to heal the animosity between the two families, Mr.

Wakern initially invokes exchangist metaphors:

"And this is the return you make me for al1 the indulgences I've heaped on you?" said Wakem, getting white, and beginning to tremble under an enraged sense of impotence before Philip's calm defiance and concentration of purpose. "No Father," said Philip, looking up at him for the first time. " f don't regard it as a return. You have been an indulgent father to me; but 1 have always felt that it was because you had an affectionate wish to give me as much happiness as my unfortunate lot would admit of- not that it was a debt you expected me to pay by sacrificing al1 rny chance of happiness to satisfy feeling of yours, which 1 can never share." (424)

Philip quickly turns on his father by challenging his notions of obligation within

a familial relationship. He insists that his relationship with his father cannot

be spoken of in terms of debt or obligation. Mr. Wakem alters his perception

of his relationship with his son and begins a more communicatively

affectionate mode of discourse with Philip based on Philip's needs rather than

on profit.

Lucy Deane, too, becomes pulled into the vortex of generosity

instigated by the prodigality of Maggie's existence. When Maggie visits Lucy

on her break from school, Lucy attributes her enjoyment of other people's

happiness to her own privileged circumstances. Comparing her Iife to

Maggie's, Lucy asserts "l've never been tried in that way," .. . "l've always

been so happy. I donnt know whether I could bear much trouble; I never had

any but poor mamma's death. You have been tried, Maggie; and I'm sure

you feel for other people quite as much as I don (373). By the end of the

narrative, Lucy, faced with the betrayal of Maggie and Stephen, has the

opportunity to give Maggie the cornfort of her forgiveness.

ln a sense Maggie's desire for the subsequent history of the prodigal

son is never realised. For while Eliot reconfigures the story, she too ends

Maggie's story with a squandering of life, which exceeds the human

machinations of either a generous or an exchangist economy. The flood7

serves to remind the teleological-minded reader that nature has an even less

controllable inherent prodigality which, while often providing luxury, can just

as easily wreak destruction. The harnessing of the river for the purposes of

profit parallels the exchangist economy's inability to account for anomaly. In

the moments before he and Maggie drown, Tom finally becomes conscious of

the worth of Maggie's prodigal generosity: "lt came with so overpowering a

force - it was such a new revelation to his spirit, of the depths in life, that had

lain beyond his vision which he had fancied so keen and clear - that he was

unable to ask a question. They sat mutely gazing at each other: Maggie with

eyes of intense life looking out from a weary, beaten face - Tom pale with a

certain awe and humiliation" (520).

While Bob can navigate both the exchangist and the generosity-based

economies within the narrative, there is never a sense that the two can be

reconciled. Mr. Wakem's reevaluation of his relationship with Philip does not

lead him to conduct business differently. It is not until Middlemarch that Eliot

' The ending of Mill on the Floss has garnered much critical attention. On first reading the novel Henry James charged Eliot with not preparing the reader for the impending flood. Similarly, Barbara Hardy suggests that the flood is an event of "Providence" in a narrative devoid of the workings of providence (63). In his article The Ending Of The Mill On The Floss." Kerry McSweeney writes "It would be perverse not to agree that there is a discontinuity between the body of The Mill on the Floss and its ending" (55). By posing the flood as

introduces characters, such as Caleb Garth and Dorothea Brooke, who see

their ability to give as a responsibility. They attempt to engage in business

benevolently so that wmmercialism will not neutralise the possibility of

generosity and genuine gifts from everyday existence.

a kind of ultimate gift, I attempt to show how it does relate to other elements in the novel.

CHAPTER THREE

Gift-Horses and lrnpetuous Generosity: The Genuine and Poisonous Debts of Middlemarch

For wealth is simpty one of the greatest powers which can be entrusted to human hands: a power, not indeed to be envied, because it seldom makes us happy; but still less to be abdicated or despised; while, in these days, and in this country, it has become a power ail the more notable, in that the possessions of a rich man are not represented as they used to be, by wedges of gold or coffers of jewels, but by masses of men variously employed, over whose bodies and minds the wealth, according to its direction, exercises harrnful or helpful influence, and becomes, in that alternative, Mammon either of Unrighteousness or of Righteousness.

Ruskin, "The Political Economy of Art" (208-9)

Like the continuing trajectory of Eliot's novels, Ruskin's discussion of the

movements of economy through the nineteenth century offers a tumultuous

attempt to grasp a nexus of values which would include an enlightened kind

of self-interest which manifests itself as generosity. As Eliot explores in Adam

Bede, Ruskin makes clear that the stability and display of wealth held within a

feudal economy can no longer be the place in which value can be ultimately

counted or conceptualised. In this new economic setting, Mammon takes up

its place within society not as a material with inherent value but as a tool that

can be used for "harmful or helpful influence." As the narrative of

Middlemarch evinces, the ways in which Mammon is used can be a way of

distinguishing "careful sailing" from "uncareful sailing." Righteous wealth

manifests itself as a letting go or a squandering of wealth without direct

reciprocity while Unrighteous wealth attempts to control the retums of charity

or gifts.

While Mill on the Floss attempts to show the often unpredictable and

far-reaching effects of gins on the receiver, Eiiot's Middlemarch and Daniel

Deronda both spend more time depiding and complicating the

responsibilities, powers and pleasures of having the capacity to give. The

laudatory efforts of Bob Jakin to participate in both an exchangist economy

and generous economy provide a vision of the complexities of exchange and

the recognition of need. Although the two econornies for the most part remain

separate within Mill on the Floss the notion of prodigality underlies both.

Bob's staternent that bad turns and good turns both demand a response and

yet take on a different register in tone plays itself out within Middlemarch in

the distinction between genuine debts and poisonous debts and genuine gifts

and poisonous gifts. Although Eliot does represent modalities of debt within

Mill on the Floss in terms of Maggie holding a debt that can never be forgiven

in exchangist terms, not until Middlemarch does Eliot provide a fuller depiction

of the difficulties in distinguishing the difference between a poisonous debt

and a genuine debt.

Because they occupy the same network of signification, notions of debt

play thernselves out in relation to the gift. Although debt often involves the

movement of money, Iike the gift, it creates and leaves a residue of sentiment

between the creditor and the debtor. The gift-debts within Middlemarch can

neither be easily commodified, nor forgotten, for they do not come

unencumbered of responsibiiity on the part of the giver or the receiver. Eliot

explores manifestations of the gift further by going deeper into the motivations

of those who give gifts. In this way, Middlemarch at times presents the reader

with gifts, which while given as genuine gifts, have a kind of counterfeit

quality. Without Eliot's exploration of motivation and intent within the

narrative, the reader would have a iess difftcult tirne perhaps distinguishing

between gifts given in generosity or magnanimity and gifts given maliciously

or with expectation of gratitude. As well, those who have the power to give

within Middlemarch often struggle with their capability, by aiways taking into

account the far reaching effects, always weighing luxury and utility. lnstead of

pushing against the limits of profit-loss economics, as in Adam Bede and Mill

on the Floss, in order ta recover generosity, Eliot excavates the ways in which

charity or self-sacrifice function for those who have wealth or a large enough

sense of self to contemplate an enlightened kind of squandering of their own

happiness or alotment. The motivations behind charity become particularly

important in this regard, for the moment charity becomes a kind of superior

form of patronage or a duty it no longer has the tone or feeling of a gift.

Feeling or sentiment, always important in Eliot's fiction and conception

of art, become markers in the evaluation of the difference between good and

bad debts. This becomes markedly clear in Middlemarch within the

movements and apparent motivations of Casaubon, Bulstrode, Featherstone,

Dorothea, and Caleb Garth, who al1 act as kinds of bankers at different points

in the narrative, but with quite different motivations. Poisonous debts and

gifts within Middlemarch, as given by Casaubon, Featherstone and Bulstrode,

are in the first instance done out of duty or without a generosity of spirit, and

in the second instance executed in order to create debts of binding obligation

which elirninate choices. Genuine debts and gifts produce a relationship

which consider differences which mnnot be quantitatively considered or

commodified. This becomes the position of those bent on creating a more

liberal building of community and allowing others choices. In this sense, Eliot

shows that a purer manifestation of the gift is to give giving so that the

expectations and powers created by the ability to give are circulated and

shared. Dorothea and Caleb Garth continually attempt to give this kind of gift,

as does Mr. Farebrother.

If I c m remind you of Carlyle's thoughts on Mammomism which

surfaced earlier in my discussion. he maintains that the general state of

affairs in regard to generosity is that "our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but

rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named 'fair cornpetition' and so forth,

it is mutual hostility" (152). Through her depiction of those with the capacity

to give, Eliot offers a range of attempts to counter a pervasive Mammonism.

What I will show is that Eliot further complicates a rejection of Mammonism

through her depiction of genuine and poisonous debt. For the most part

profit-loss economics within Middlemarch are only gestured towards in order

to lay daim to or bolster other means of exchange which are not money-

centered but people-centered. She shows the connection between wealth

and the potential 'ownership' of the bodies. work or movements of others

suggested by Ruskin in "The Political Economy of Art" within the systems of

debts in the town of Middlemarch. To be indebted to someone within

Middlemarch often extends to mean you are employed by them, or in their

employ. But as in Adam Bede, there are instances in which work, debt, or

"business" takes on a transcendental quality. which exceeds the immediate

material exchanges it enacts. In Middlemarch, Eliot demonstrates that by

taking into account the needs and desires of others, those who have the

capacity to give also receive, embodying a community based on what Carlyle

refers to above as a "mutual helpfulness."

The first conspicuous debt within the narrative belongs to Fred Vincy,

who, having been given an inappropriate education and expectations,

cultivates habits and debts beyond his actual circumstances. Eliot depicts

Fred's movement from poisonous debt to good debt through his shift from Mr.

Featherstone's employ to Caleb Garth's. Saying Fred is in the employ of Mr.

Featherstone is to shadow forth the ways in which not just the expectation of

an inheritance but an inheritance itself can hinder genuine debts from

occurring. While Fred does not literally offer his inheritance as collateral on

his loan. his movements within Middlemarch society suggest that he is

counting and banking on the lifestyle his inheritance will afford him. An odd

kind of counterfeiting occurs within the relationship between Mr. Featherstone

and Fred, for Featherstone's preference for Fred depends somewhat on

Fred's counterfeit gentlemanly appearance. Featherstone expresses delight

in the fact that those who come into contact with Fred know that Fred's

appearance and habits are supported by Featherstone. As the narrator tells

us his "eyes gleamed with a curiously mingled satisfaction in the

consciousness that this smart young fellow relied upon him, and that the

smart young fellow was rather a fool for doing son (164). In effect, Fred

represents or is a representative of Featherstone's unfighteous Mammon.

When Fred appears at Stone Court with Bulstrode's note, which both

clears and condemns him, in order to receive a much-needed gift of money.

the odd complications of gratitude which surround gifts come into play:

The deep-veined hands fingered many bank-notes one after the other, laying them down flat again, while Fred leaned back in his chair, scoming to look eager. He held himself to be a gentleman at heart, and did not like courting an old fellow for his money, At last, Mr. Featherstone eyed him again over his spectacles and presented him with a little sheaf of notes; Fred could see distinctly that there were but five, as the less significant edges gaped towards him, But then, each rnight mean fifty pounds. He took them, saying -

'1 am much obliged to you sir,' and was going to roll them up without seeming to think of their value. But this did not suit Mr. Featherstone, who was eyeing him intently.

'Corne, don't you think it worth your while to count' em? You take money like a lord; I suppose you lose it like one.'

' 1 thought I was not to look a gift-horse in the rnouth, sir. But I should be happy to wunt them.'

Fred was not so happy, however, after he had counted thern. For they actually presented the absurdity of being less than his hopefulness had decided that they must be. (163)

Mr. Featherstone cannot allow Fred to accept his gift without thoroughly

establishing its value. He wishes to savour the moment in which his power

over Fred is materially actualised. Eliot, quick to provide irony for her more

careful readers, shows Fred aware of what the appropriate gentlemanly

behaviour in the reception of a gift might be, but at the sarne time allows for

Mr. Featherstone's and Fred's awareness that gentleman donPt usually

require gifts of money. As Emerson's essay on the gift suggests, receiving a

poisonous gift often causes ambivalence:

He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence, I think is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when my gift comes fram such as do not know rny spirit, and so the act is not supported; and if the gift pleases me overmuch, then 1 should be ashamed that the donor should read my heart, and see that I love his commodity, and not him. (26)

Fred, as a gentleman "at heart," attempts to receive al1 gifts as genuine gifts.

Fred's unwillingness to look a gift horse in the mouth encapsulates his

willingness to counterfeit a gentlemanly pose by first entering into debt and

then accepting the terms of a poisonous gift-debt. By "accepting money like a

lord" he does not meet the reality of his circurnstances intelligently. He is not

a lord receiving a gift supported by someone who knows his spirit. Mr.

Featherstone's insistence on the counting and crowing over his gift places it

firmly within the realm of an employer paying his employee. Fred both

rejoices and grieves over his rnuch-needed pay check when he realises first

that Mr. Featherstone requires a larger display of gratitude than is

gentlemanly, second that the amount of rnoney is far less than he hopes for,

and third that because of his gentlemanly composure he cannot express his

disappointment. As Eliot shows in Mill on the Floss, gift-debts either genuine

or poisonous produce relationships which have effects. While F red manages

finally to slide and fall into good debt with Caleb Garth. he continues to

believe that gift-horses need not be examined too closely: "he was always

prone to believe that he could make money by the purchase of a horse which

turned out badly - though this Mary observed, was of course the fault of the

horse, not of Fred's judgement" (891).

Because Featherstone's promises of money are done out of a delight

in manipulation, they are targely unreliable and unpredictable. as

demonstrated by the different versions of his will. As well' through the Vincy-

Garth plot Eliot offers a range of opinions in reference to Mr. Featherstone's

will. While the Vincys remain disappointed at Fred's not receiving his

promised inheritance. the Garths appreciate that Fred can no longer continue

counterfeiting. Once Mr. Featherstone is dead he can no longer control

people directly by having them in his employ. Stone Court is sold by his heir

and Fred Vincy must reassess his prospects. By finding employment with

Caleb Garth. Fred enters into the channels of genuine debt, for Caleb does

not regard the financial debt Fred owes him as a significant standard in

determining their relationship to each other' (439). Possessing the same kind

of memory based on generosity as Maggie, he gives Fred the benefit of the

doubt because of Fred's love and kindness towards Mary. He contends that

in forming an opinion of someone not just results but also intentions should be

taken into account; "We must forgive young people when they're sorry" (441).

- -

1 Fred's squandering ways are similar to Maggie's. His penchant for debt, good or bad, tends to allow others the opportunity to give. His perception of his bad debt to Caleb leads him to ask Mr. Farebrother for a favour, providing Mr. Farebrother with an opportunity to act generously. Unlike Maggie, however, Fred is self-serving.

Casaubon's debt handling in regards to W~l l resembles that between

Featherstone and Fred. As Featherstone does not wnsider the effects of his

gifts and promises on Fred's well being, Casaubon gives rnoney to Will only

out of a sense of righting past wrongs. Both acts of "uncareful" sailing,

neither Causabon nor Featherstone's mammon is "supportedJ' by the

knowledge of the receiver's spirit (Emerson 26). Casaubon considers how

everyone besides Will reads his actions, not taking into account that Will

might read them any differently or more closely than he intends. Wll begins

to sense the limited way in which Casaubon views him, but refrains at first

frorn telling Dorothea:

In his inmost sou1 Will was conscious of wishing to tell Dorothea what was rather new even in his own construction of things- namely, that Mr Casaubon had never done more than pay a debt towards him. Will was much too good a fellow to be easy under the sense of being ungrateful. And when gratitude has become a matter of reasoning there are many ways of escaping from its bonds. (401 )

Like Fred, WiII has a sense that to express ingratitude would be to deny the

existence of generosity. The phrase "rather new even in his own construction

of things" suggests the difficulty in rewgnising a generosity of intention that

Eliot atternpts to demonstrate through her offering of many different

perspectives on the same act of giving. M e n an act of charity becomes

attributed to duty or propriety some of the generous feelings attached to it are

leached out; a less prodigal or nutrient form of the gift occurs. As already

demonstrated in Fred's ambivalence and struggles to maintain a façade of

gratitude towards Mr. Featherstone, WiII senses uncomfortably that once he

must make an effort to express gratitude he is no longer in the realm of a

genuine debt.

Dorothea, ever willing to adopt the most generous interpretation of an

individual's motivations because she believes that ultimately the prescriptive

is descriptive, rejects Will's questioning of Casaubon's motivations in his

financial support: "'No,' answered Dorothea: 'Mr. Casaubon has always

avoided dwelling on his honourable actions.' She did not feel that her

husband's conduct was depreciated; but this notion of what justice had

required in his relations with WiII Ladislaw took strong hold on her mind"

(400). It is not until later that Will offers his opinions of indebtedness to

Dorothea:

'Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning. I would not have accepted the position if I had not meant to make it useful and honourable. I am not bound to regard family dignity in any other light.' (426)

Will balks at Casaubon's attempts to control his movements through the bond

created by retributive money. He insists that if Casaubon's intentions were

truly generous he would not attempt to use his gifts to enslave. Casaubon

expects his generosity to instill a sense of obligation in Will that will at the very

least give him control over the parameters of their relationship. Casaubon

insists that the paying of his debt to the past erases any need for Will's

existence to affect him (other than cosmetically). Again, it is the employer of

the poisonous debt who insists that obligation only moves one way. resulting

in a relationship based not on mutual generosity but on possessive

patronage.

In the mind of exchangists such as Causabon, debt on the surface,

without any personal or extra-monetary concerns, appears as a function of

capital within a finite system. As 1 discuss in my introduction, Eliot's fiction

when read through conceptions of the gift wntinually collapses the distinction

between public sphere economy and private sphere morality. But, as Eliot

makes clear, the calculable aspects of debt, especially in a place as small as

Middlemarch in which everyone knows everyone else, do not even begin to

capture or account for the ties created between the creditor and the debtor.

In the relatively small community of Middlemarch the possibility for one

individual to act as a banker is fully realised. The very willingness to loan

money to an individual in the first place becomes an act of faith far exceeding

money changing hands. However. by the use of "act of faith" 1 do not mean to

imply benevolence in al1 instances of loaning. As Eliot's depiction of the

Gleggs within Mill on the Floss shows, an "act of faith" does not always occur

without benefit to the person loaning the money. In the case of Bulstrode, he

does not loan money without expectations or strings attached. With the rise

and fail of Bulstrode's fortune Eliot fleshes out the implications of Emerson's

supposition that "the expectation of gratitude is mean. and is continually

punished by the insensibility of the obliged person. It is a great happiness to

get off without injury or heart-burning, from one who has had the il1 luck to be

served by you" (27).

Bulstrode only serves poisonous debts in that the hand stretched out

open to give the money firmly takes hold of the person going into debt so that

the agency of the individual in debt becomes severely hampered by having to

continually take into account Bulstrode's expectations and desires. The

image of the hand outstretched as an offering of a poisonous or a genuine

debt occurs frequently throughout Eliot's fiction. ln the case of Middlemarch

both Featherstone's will and Casaubon's will are figured as hands stretching

out past the grave to inhibit or almost strangle the receivers of their bequests.

With the writing of his will, Mr. Featherstone chuckles "over the vexations he

could inflict by the rigid clutch of his dead hand" (358). Indeed, Eliot entitles

book five of Middlemarch "The Dead Hand;" in this book Dorothea and the

rest of Middlemarch unravel the implications of the codicil to Casaubon's will

which affects and limits Dorothea's actions from the grave, exemplifying the

continuing sense that an inheritance raises many of the same complications

as debts or gifts.'

To accept Bulstrode's money then is to enter fully into his religion-lined

narrative which Mr. Vincy asserts is tyrannical in spirit because it wants "to

play bishop and banker everywhere" and at the same time (159). At the

beginning of chapter 16 the narrator of Middlemarch spends some time

The act of shaking hands in Eliot also relates directly to moments of giving and forgiveness, specifically between men. In Adam Bede, Arthur wishes Adam to shake his hand after their fight concerning Hetty; in MiII on the Floss, Bob and Tom shake hands after Tom refuses to take Bab's money; and in Middlemarch Fred and his father shake hands after Fred tells his father that he will be opposing his father's wishes by working for Caleb Garth. All of these instances represent moments in which the continuation of an economy of care or generosity is desired.

describing and positioning Mr. Bulstrode within the networks and

machinations of town life. As the narrator notes, Mr. Bulstrode uses his

position as a banker to enforce and expand his sphere of influence.

Mr. Bulstrode's power was not due simply to his being a country banker, who knew the financial secrets of most traders in the town and could touch the springs of their credit; it was fortified by a beneficence that was at once ready and severe- ready to confer obligations, and severe in watching the result. He had gathered, as an industrious man always at his post, a chief share in administering the town charities, and his private charities were both minute and abundant. He would take a great deal of pains about apprenticing Tegg the shoemakeis son, and he would watch over Tegg's churchgoing; he would defend Mrs. Strype the washerwoman against Stubb's unjust exaction on the score of her drying-ground, and he would himself scrutinize a calumny against Mrs Strype. His private minor loans were numerous, but he would inquire strictly into the circumstances both before and after. In this way a man gathers a domain in his neighbours' hope and fear as well as gratitude; and power, when once it has got into that subtle region, propagates itself, spreading out of ail proportion to its external means. (184)

The creation of obligation which Bulstrode cultivates differs greatly from the

cash nexus economics Eliot portrays in Adam Bede and Mill on the Floss. As

the narrator suggests, Bulstrode's use of money is not just about amassing

more money. Rather than adopting an exchangist econorny based on profit,

Bulstrode counterfeits a generous economy. By using money as a twl

(almost a con) rather than as an end in itself, he creates and supports

'charitable' networks which bind those he has helped to him- almost as if they

become part of him. Bulstrode's debts, while a part of him in the way

Emerson imagines a genuine gift, have the 'intent' of a self-replicating virus in

that the part of Bulstrode given as a gift changes the recipient into (an agent

of) Bulstrode.

What Bulstrode says often makes a great deal of sense in terms of a

generous economy but the sentiment behind his words and his habit of

reminding people that they have an obligation to listen and even meet his

wishes because he has loaned them money is analogous to the unrighteous

use of Mammon Ruskin discusses in The Political Economy of Art. His

intentional collection and use of his powers to tie people to his purposes

places him closer to the benevolent vengeance of Mr. Wakem than to

Dorothea's passionate benevolence. Mr. Bulstrode's benevolent vengeance,

however, is enacted more consciously and with more self-righteousness than

Mr. Wakem's. His level of specific involvement with those around him with

fewer tools and hence power enables him to narrow rather than enlarge the

possibilities and choices of those in his debt. Dorothea's sense of charity and

perhaps even altruism, in contrast, only ever widens and enriches the Iives of

those around her. Curiously, however, Eliot shows that both Bulstrode and

Dorothea are in the process of working out a similar set of questions. Both

consider luxury and utility in the process of giving. Both face censure and

misunderstanding on the part of their peers.

In a conversation with Mr. Vincy, Bulstrode defends his wish to support

those whom he perceives as tenable: "1 do not expect you to understand my

grounds of action - it is not an easy thing even to thread a path for principles

in the intricacies of the world - still less to make the thread clear for the

careless and the scoffing" (1 58). This statement easily mirrors many

struggles in the narrative ta find a continuing thread of 'good' acts or

principles. Indeed, the majority of the characters within Middlemarch in sorne

way are in the process of attempting to realise Bulstrode's claim that he

"cannot regard wealth as a blessing to those who use it simply as a harvest

for this world" (1 58). Mr. Bulstrode. however, does not stop with the

communication of his difficulties which rnight result in the creation and

sustaining of a mutuality based on a common struggle towards something

good, rigbt, or better. Instead, he attempts to put Mr. Vincy in a position of

patronage by reminding him of his continuing debt to him: "'You must

remember, if you please, that I stretch my tolerance towards you as my wife's

brother, and that it little becomes you to complain of me as withholding

material help towards the worldly position of your family. I must remind you

that it is not your own prudence or judgement that has enabled you to keep

your place in trade"' (158). By gesturing towards the material aspect of his

relationship to Mr Vincy in order to chastise the luxury of the Vincy household,

Bulstrode again demonstrates his willingness to allow the material benefits of

possessing money to form his arguments and self righteousness against it.

He does not consider that his collecting and preserving of obligation ba rs

little difference from the luxuries of table at the Vincy's or Mr. Farebrother's

insect co~lection.~

In my rnind, Eliot's awareness of the sliding demarcations of luxury for different characters depending on their cirwmstances provides sorne of the most luxurious details of her fiction. In these instances the srnallest movement away from necessity still remains tenable within the 'ideally' prudential economic landscapes which she often represents. Who would deny Adam Bede's Bartle Massey his luxury of wheat bread instead of oatcake; Mill on the Floss' Bob Jakin's relish of a hot dinner; Middlemarch's Farebrother's well chosen Iibrary of naturalist texts and drawers of insects; or

Featherstone, Casaubon. and Bulstrode each attempt to control the

future effects of their loans by calculating the use of their iegacies before and

after their influence might potentially wane. In the case of Casaubon and

Featherstone this occurs through inheritance and promise. Bulstrode counts

on the initial tie of a loan or gift to have the lasting effects and the infection of

his will into others. As quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Ruskin

suggests that wealth is a power "not to be envied, because it seldom makes

us happy; but still less to be abdicated or despisedn (208). Featherstone,

Casaubon and Bulstrode al1 face the kind of effects and attitudes Ruskin

associates with the power of wealth. Similarly, Dorothea's wealth does not

bring her happiness any more than it brings the respect or understanding of

those around her.

Through Dorothea's struggles to give benevolently, Eliot characterises

a different kind of debt-getting and forgiving with her representation of both

organised charity and a kind of mental charity. Dorothea stniggles throughout

the narrative with the lirnits of utility and the resulting luxury through her

possession of a wealth she finds both burdensome and liberating. From the

very opening of the narrative the narrator places Dorothea within the

discourse of utility4. Dorothea has a continuing difficulty in deciding at which

- -- -

even Felix Holt's Esther's desire for wax instead of tallow candles? Perhaps it is because al1 of these characters make sacrifices or give generously in either or both their work or intimate relationships. That being said, these moments inevitably force the reader into an 'occasion' of query surrounding the boundaries of their own limits of necessity.

The similarities and difference between Maggie and Dorothea can be viewed through the manifestations of the gift within the two different narratives. Emerson's distinction between "crude boats" or "careful sailing ,"

point utility becornes luxury. Her idealism does not allow her to view giving as

a luxury but as an obligation. While she longs for a "good," she cannot allow

that good to eclipse what she imagines as luxury. She continually reassesses

those activities she takes pleasure in to be sure that they meet her

conceptualisations of necessity. Both Dorothea and Buistrode act directly as

bankers within Middlemarch, forcing the reader to make finer and finer

distinctions between genuine and poisonous debts. If a debt-gift is

considered as a continuing obligation which binds the recipient to the giver,

Eliot's genuine gift occurs when the giver of debts or gifts feels just as

beholden to the receiver - or as Emerson points out often: "we do not quite

forgive a giver" (26). A 'responsible' giver has just as much reason ta ask

forgiveness of the recipient for creating a moment in which obligation or

gratitude might be expected of the receiver.

The passing of Lydgate's debt from Bulstrode's hands to Dorothea's

hands is a case in point. Like F red's rnoving from the employ of Featherstone

to that of Caleb Garth, Lydgate's move from the restrictive quality of

Bulstrode's poisonous debt to Dorothea's genuine debt demonstrates Eliot's

which I discussed in my previous chapter, as necessary for gift-giving, also comes into play within Middlemarch. While Maggie's prodigality can be associated with the crude boats of aleatory gifts which cause giving, the gifts within Middiemarch, have the markings of more careful sailing. While Dorothea's unwaning passionate prodigality mirrors Maggie's. she has more money and opportunity to act within the established channels of giving through her inheritance. Dorothea's passionate prodigality, however, does not come without a layer of critique or irony. Through Dorothea's attribution of generosity ont0 wasps and sparrows, Eliot implies Dorothea's somewhat naïve idealism: "no nature could be less suspicious than hers; when she was a child she believed in the gratitude of wasps and honourable susceptibility of

continuing attempts 10 depict an ewnomy of generosity. Facing the

unwillingness of her peers to act on Lydgate's behalf, Dorothea's "impetuous

generosity" leads her to ask "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less

difficult to each other?" (790). In her attempts to bolster Lydgate's waning

confidence in himself, Dorothea offers bath a vote of confidence and her

money:

'It huas me very rnuch to hear you speak so hopelessly,' said Dorothea. 'It would be a happiness to your friends, who believe in your future, in your power to do great things, if you would let them Save you from that. Think how much money I have; it would be Iike taking a burden from me if you took some of it every year till you got free from this fettering want of income. Why should not people do these things? It is so difficult to make shares at al1 even. This is one way.' (825)

Dorothea offers a debt to Lydgate with a hand that does not attempt to hold

him. She frames the acceptance of her generosity as a favour Lydgate could

perform for her. In this way she gives him the ability to accept without feeling

mastered. They are partners in a mutual project rather than ueditor and

debtor.

Dorothea's association with Lydgate leads to her largest act of

selfiessness. Similar to Dinah's gift of solace to Hetty in Adam Bede,

Dorothea sets aside her feelings of jealously to cornfort c os am und'. Allowing

the reader Rosamund's initial response to Dorothea's entrance, Eliot shows

that those caught up within an exchangist system anticipate acts of

sparrows, and was proportionately indignant when their baseness was made manifest" (248).

Her second visit to Rosamund has often been noted as Dorothea's ultimate act of charity within Middlemarch. In her book George Eliot. Kerry McSweeney asserts that the visit is representative of one of the "perennialn

"benevolent vengeance": "To Rosamund's pained confused vision it seemed

that this Mrs Casaubon - this woman who predominated in al1 things

concerning her - must have corne now with the sense of advantage, and with

animosity prompting her to use it" (851 ). Instead, Dorothea gives from herself

in a moment in which she can discern someone etse's needs and place them

above her own. Her gift is "supported" because it is conveyed in her

"biography" (Emerson 376). Eliot implies that generous people can cause

exchangist people to perform acts which can be read generously. After

Rosamund exonerates Will, Dorothea assumes that Rosamund, tao, can act

selflessly. "With her tendency to over-estimate the good in others, she felt a

great outgoing of her heart towards Rosamund for the generous effort which

had redeemed her from suffering, not counting that the effort was a reflex of

her own energy" (857). ln her visit to Rosamund and eventual marriage to

Wll. Dorothea bears out LydgateJs musing that "'her love might help a man

more than her money,"' providing an example of a definitive reversal of the

tenets of Mammonism (826).

More materially, Dorothea and Caleb Garth reconceptualise the

movement of money to reach towards a generous economy based on

genuine debt. Caleb's vision of profit has little to do with money. He refigures

the word 'business' so that it has little to do with monetary gain. "lt must be

remembered that by 'business' Caleb never meant money transactions, but

themes of Eliot's fiction: "what may be called the humanistic economy of salvationn (1 29).

the skilful application of labour" (596). A solid investment gives giving to

those living during and after his tifetime:

'it's a fine thing to come to a man when he's seen into the nature of business; to have a chance of getting a bit of the country into g w d fettle, as they Say, and putting men into the right way of farming. and getting a bit of good contriving and solid building done - that those who are living and those who come after will be the better for. I'd swner have it than a fortune. I hold it the most honourable work there is.' Here Caleb laid down his letters, thrust his fingers between the buttons of his waistcoat, and sat upright, but presently proceeded with some awe in his voice and moving his head slowly aside - 'lt's a great gift of God, Susan.' (438)

As in Adam Bede, in Middlernarch Eliot extols the capacity to work at

something that is valuable both in the process of its being done and in its

lasting effects. After f red has failed to pay the debt which Caleb undersigned

for him, he approaches Caleb with a sense that he has no ground from which

to ask Caleb for any favours:

'Of course I have not the least claim- indeed, I have already a debt to you which will never be discharged, even when I have been able to pay it in the shape of money.' 'Yes, rny boy, you have a claim,' said Caleb, with much feeling in his voice. 'The young ones have always a claim on the old to help them forward. I was young myself once and had to do without much help; but help would have been welcome to me, if it had k e n only for the fellow-feeling's sake. (608)

Caleb dismisses Fred's use of the metaphors of an exchangist economy to

frame their relationship to each other and replaces it with one based on

forgiveness and generosity. Caleb, like Dorothea, insists that he, too, is in

Fred's debt. lnstead of the ambivalence created by the restrictive obligations

of poisonous debts, genuine debts or in this instance "claims" only produce a

sense of worth on the side of both parties rather than a sense of lack. Caleb

believes that the gifts he has been given should be given in kind. Dorothea's

words to Caleb about her desired effect on reality reflect the tonal differences

between genuine debts and poisonous debts: "Mr. Garth, 1 should like to feel.

if I lived to be old, that I had improved a great piece of land and built a great

many good cottages, because the work is of a healthy kind while it is being

done, and after it is done, men are the better for it" (596).

Eliot's portrayai of Mr. F arebrother offers further delineation of the

difference between genuine and poisonous debts. In Mr. FarebrotherJs

estimation to allow a gift to remain anonymous is to cheat the receiver of the

gift from participating in a generous economy. He desires to be under

obligation to those who are generous rather than those who are malevolent or

indifferent to him6. After he finds out from Dorothea that Lydgate has

performed a good turn by recommending hirn for the opening on her estate,

Mr. Farebrother chides Lydgate's desire to let a good turn remain

anonymous:

'Ah, you didn't mean me to know it; I cal1 that ungenerous reticence. You should let a man have the pleasure of feeling that you have done him a good tum. I don't enter into some people's dislike of being under an obligation; upon my word, I prefer being under an obligation to everybody for behaving well to me.' (695)

Lydgate, still determined to hold on to his ideal gift. is unable to ask Mr.

Farebrother for any help, even sympathy:

Mary Garth holds a similar vision to that of Mr. Farebrother. She would rather enter into and sustain relationships with people who interact with her on the basis of generosity and mutuality where both parties are 'seen' or acknowledged by each other. When Rosamond asks her opinion of Lydgate she replies "There is no question of liking at present. My liking always wants

So strangely determined are we mortals, that, after having been long gratified with the sense that he had privately done the Vicar a service, the suggestion that the Vicar discerned his need of a service in return made him shrink into unconquerable reticence. Besides, behind al1 making of such offers what else must corne?-that he should 'mention his case1, imply that he wanted specific things. At that moment, suicide seemed easier. (696)

Mr. Farebrother continues to stimulate an economy of generosity by providing

others with the opportunity to give and exercise their own configurations of

luxury. Not only does he give up his own desire to pursue a relationship with

Mary Garth by acting as an ambassador for Fred but he also provides sugar

for the Robin Hood-like missions of Miss ~oble'.

some little kindness to kindle it. I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me" (141).

As in Adam Bede and Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch contains smaller characters who activate a less problematic or malicious giftqiving economy. Miss Noble is al1 too aware having the ability to be charitable or provide moments of luxury for others is in and of itself a luxury. Her movements encapsulate the continuum of utility and luxury by becoming a kind of Robin Hood, giving to the children of Middlemarch. In order to participate within a gift giving economy she squirrel's away her ration of sugar from the Farebrother household:

She carried on her arm a small basket, into which she diverted a bit of sugar, which she had first dropped in her saucer as if by mistake; looking round furtively afterwards, and reverting to her tea-cup with a small innocent noise as of any tiny timid quadruped, Pray think no il1 of Miss Noble. The basket held small savings from her more portable food, destined for the children of her poor friends among whom she trotted on fine mornings; fostering and petting al1 needy creatures being so spontaneous a delight to her, that she regarded it much as if it had been a pleasant vice that she was addicted to. Perhaps she was conscious of being tempted to steal from those who had much that she might give to those who had nothing, and carried in her conscience the guilt of that repressed desire. One must be poor to know the luxury of giving! (1 99)

The idealised vision of Robin Hood appears elsewhere in Eliot's fiction within the context of gift-giving and stealing. Maggie reflects on the gypsies' examination of al1 her personal effects that "they must certainly be thieves,

The depiction of the rnovements of money within Eliot's fiction

escalates as the feudalism depicted in Adam Bede continues to wane. The

motivations behind the use of money provide a way in which the reader can

distinguish between the genuine gifts and poison gifts of the narrative. ln

Middlemarch Eliot exposes the way in which conceptions of debt and

obligation bewme entangled with gift-giving. Because money can be

conceived in quantitative terms, its use as a gift can often be poisonous.

Casaubon, for instance believes that he can treat Will as a commodity. Eliot's

cornmitment to the depiction of generous economy suggests not only that

people cannot be commodified but that they can also possess the capacity to

discern the difference between genuine and poisonous debts. Emerson

expresses his continuing faith in this capacity:

I like to see that we cannot be bought and sold. The best of hospitality and of generosity is also not in the will but in fate. I find that I am not much to you; you do not need me; you do not feel me; then am I thrust out of doors, though you proffer me house and lands. No services are of any value, but only likeness. When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick, - no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, and delight in you al1 the time. (379)

Dorothea's ability to make people feel more than employed allows her to use

money as a genuine gift. In Daniel Deronda, Eliot continues to depict the

difficulties faced by individuals bent on instituting a generous economy

through the distribution of genuine gifts and debts. Specifically, Eliot explores

-

unless the man meant to return her thimble byand-by. She would willingly have given it to him, for she was not at al1 attached to her thimble; but the idea that she was among thieves prevented her from feeling any comfort in the revival of deference and attention towards her - al1 thieves, except Robin Hood, were wicked peoplen (1 1 1 ).

the dilemma of the truly generous Daniel. whose active sympathy and love for

people still rooted in exchangist economy causes his genuine gifts to be

perceived as poisonous.

CHAPTER FOUR

Generous Parting, Generous Art: Gifts Without the Promise of Return

in Daniel Deranda

The question a woman's text asks is the question of giving- 'What does this writing give?" 'How does it give?" And talking about non- origin and beginnings, you might say it "gives a send-off" (donne le départ). Let's take the expression "giving a send-off" in a metaphorical sense: giving a send-off is generally giving the signal to depart. I think it's more than giving the departure signal, it's really giving, making a gift of, departure, allowing departure, allowing breaks, "parts," partings, separations.. .from this we break with the retum-to- self, with the specular relations niling the coherence, the identification, of the individual.

Hélène Cixous , "Castration or Decapitation" (53)

In her continuing meditations on the existence of generosity, Eliot temporally'

embarks on her final novel, Daniel Deronda, with the woman artist Alchansi's

search for a gift given without the promise of retum: " Is there a man capable

of doing something for love of me, and expecting nothing in retum?'" (543).

As in the other novels I have discussed, in Daniel Deronda Eliot positions gifts

within two very different systems of exchange. Like Adam Bede, Mill on the

Floss and Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda illustrates the limitations of an

economy based on profit and loss economics by offenng instances in which

the rnastery involved in an exchangist economy is rejected and a different

economy, based on generosity, diffusion and separation, occurs. Eliot

represents this shift primarily through Gwendolen, who first realises that she

does not possess enough capital to win in an exchangist economy, before

she rejects it and tentatively adopts an economy of generosity. Within

Gwendolen's struggle for autonomy, Eliot juxtaposes the gift-giving of

Grandcourt and Deronda as a means of distinguishing and elucidating the

intricacies of the two economic models.

White Mill on the Floss represents the prodigafity of language in

relation to the gift, it isn't until Daniel Deronda that Eliot offers art as a

potential site of an economy of generosity. The role and representation of art

within Daniel Deronda also serves to trouble the stability and borders of

capitalism based on private property. Like gifts, a work of art (or a text), in its

capacity to allow multiple interpretations, exceeds exchangist expectations.

As the parable of the prodigal son forms part of Mill on the Floss, Eliot allows

a number of different characters in Daniel Deronda to nanate myths of gift-

giving which give opportunity for multiple readings. As well, Eliot depicts a

number of working artists within Daniel Deronda who assert their value

outside of monetary metaphors. The role of Daniel's mother, Alchansi,

becomes particularly important in this context, for her parting with Daniel is

the first instance of a gift without promise of retum. By accepting her

responsibilities as an artist and proclaiming her nght to exceed her father's

In the spirit of Cixous's quotation, Eliot does not begin her novel at its temporal beginning. Alcharisi's narrative of Daniel's adoption does not

laws of exchange, she encapsulates Cixous's notion of the gift that allows

parting. Her ability to establish a moment of departure creates a space in

which Sir Hugo can become "capable of doing something for love of [her], and

[expect] nothing in retumw (543). Thus, art and friendship provide instances in

which genuine gifts can be cultivated, given, and received.

As I have already suggested, Eliot depicts capitalist economy as one

based on exchanges which offer and.expect equal retums. The rules of this

economy demand that any gift given must be reciprocated or the person

receiving the gift acquires a debt. The receiver is neither capable of forgetting

nor allowed to forget the debügift; if he or she is unable to pay, the receiver is

placed in a state of obligation or gratitude which manifests itself in a kind of

mastery by the giver over the receiver. In this context, as Marcel Mauss

points out, a "genuine," "free," or "unencumberedn gift is impossible. Gifts are

given in a nexus of power relations in which the rules always obligate the

receiver to return a gift of equivalent value.

Cixous relates this need for mastery to the notion of property within an

economy of direct exchange:

Etymologically, the "propei' is "property," that which is not separable from me. Property is proximity, neamess: we must love our neighbon, those close to us, as ourselves: we must draw close to the other so that we may love him/her, because we love ourselves most of all. The realm of the proper, culture, functions by the appropriation atticulated, set into play, by man's classic fear of seeing himself expropriated, seeing himself deprived, in a state of separation, by his fear of losing the prerogative, fear whose response is al1 of History. Everything must retum to the masculine. 'Retum": the economy is founded on a system

appear until well past the middle of the novel.

of returns. If a man spends and is spent, it's on condition that his power retums. (50)

In exchangist economy there can be no giving without the creation of

obligation "for the moment you receive something you are effectively 'open' to

the other, and if you are a man you have only one wish," to retum the gift as

quickly as possible (48). Eliot shows the potentially harmful consequences of

this system. Like the benevolent vengeance of Mr. Wakem in The Mill on the

Floss, the desire to possess, or to receive a retum on an investment, is the

impetus for much of the abuse of power depicted within Daniel Deronda.

In The Newly Born Woman, Cixous is careful to clarify that her use of

male and female economies does not refer to a biological essentialism:

Words like 'masculine' and 'feminine' that circulate everywhere and that are completely distorted in everyday usage. -words which refer, of course, to a classical opposition between men and women- are our burden, that is what burdens us. As I have often said, my work in fact aims at getting rid of words like 'feminine' and 'masculine,' 'femininity' and 'rnasculinity,' even 'man' and 'woman,' which designates that which cannot be classified inside of a signifier except by force and violence and which goes beyond it in any case. (85)

The operation of individuals within these two models of exchange is not

gender specific. Eliot acknowledges her belief in equal opportunity

exchangism in Daniel Deronda through the character of Gwendolen who,

although a wornan, assumes the metaphors and strategies of exchangist

economy? Eliot's relationship to gender politics is cornplex and mutable. In

* Although Eliot's women characters realistically have less access to recognised forms of capital, the ones who do have access to it (like Eliot's male characters) demonstrate an affiliation to either an exchange economy or a generous economy. In the Mill on the Floss, Mn. Glegg makes her own investments and wields obligation similar to other exchangists. Conversely, Dorothea wishes to squander her money thoughtfully and generously.

this instance, like Cixous, she attempts to trouble classical notions of gender

while at the same time to illuminate the difficulties women have operating

within an exchange economy. Like Cixous, Eliot takes up notions of

masculinity and femininity to engage with notions of exchange because "the

economy of the masculine and the feminine is organized by different

demands and constraints, which, as they become socialized and

metaphorized. produce signs, relations of power, relationships of production

and reproduction, a whole huge system of cultural inscription that is legible as

masculine and femininen (Cixous 80-81 ).

By problematising conceptions of masculinity and femininity, Eliot

depicts an economy of generosity that is potentially not gender specific. The

characterisation of Daniel within the novel serves to show this struggle with

signifiers. "He had not lived with other boys, and his mind showed the same

blending of child's ignorance with surprising knowledge which is oftener seen

in bright girls" (1 41 ). Daniel becomes associated with the feminine in his

attempts to establish and move within an economy of generosity. His desire

to help people fuek his acts of generosity. Separated from his family at birth,

he embodies a gift without expectation of retum. Because he does not

legitimately belong to only one person, he does not have a single context or

reading. He moves through the narrative, interacting and exchanging with

people possessing very different value systems.

Realistically, as well, the gifts women have the capacity to give in Eliot's fiction are for the most part not purchased in any market, and consequently have a better chance of being closer to Emerson's "thou must bleed for men kind of gifts.

Daniel's ability to consider context allows him both to give genuine gifts

and to perfonn genuine readings. Throughout Daniel Deronda, Eliot provides

the reader with Daniel's reading of exchangist economy. Over dinner

conversation at Diplow after Grandcourt and Gwendoten's engagement, the

narrator recounts:

Grandcourt, she inwardly conjectured, was perhaps right in saying that Deronda thought too much of himself:- a favourite way of explaining a superiority that humiliates. However, the talk tumed on the rinderpest and Jamaica; and no more was said about roulette. Grandcourt held that the Jamaican negro was a beastly sort of baptist Caliban; Deronda said he had always felt a little with Caliban. who naturally had his own point of view and could sing a good Song; Mrs Davilow observed that her father had an estate in Barbadoes, but that she herself had never been in the West Indies; Mn. Torrington was sure she should never sleep in her bed if she lived among blacks; her husband corrected her by saying that the bfacks would be manageable enough if it were not for the half-breeds; and Deronda remarked that the whites had to thank themselves for the half-breeds. (279)

The narrator pnvileges Daniel's point of view, which instantly calls into

question the reliability of Grandcourt's point of view. The invocation of two

instances of rebellion within British colonies and the ridiculously ignorant

responses on the part of the guests serve to further bolster Daniel's attempts

at an active understanding of context . The mention of the estate in

Barbadoes, which has never been visited, gestures towards Eliot's subtle

critique of Gwendolen's unwillingness to understand the intricacies of her

family's investments abroad. Eliot continuously shows that to act and speak

without any attempt at contexualisation produces inhumane behaviour and

attitudes. By also leading into this conversation with a discussion of roulette,

Eliot suggests a relationship between gambling, selfish egomania, and

exchangist economy, al1 of which necessitate an insular narrow point of view.

Eliot furlher critiques exchangist economy by demonstrating how

marriage has been reduced to reciprocity based on economic status. The

heiress Catherine Arrowpoint's situation parallel's Gwendolen's situation in

that the marriage opportunities of both get linked to their monetary status.

Catherine is reduced to a marker of her father's fortune to be invested and

negotiated without care for her personal happiness. As in Middlemarch, Eliot

depicts the exchangist assumption that in employing someone you have the

right to dictate the t e n s of the relationship. Mr. Arrowpoint assumes there

can be no lasting affection between Katherine and Klesmer because he

provides him with a paycheck (203). lesm me? scorns this marnage market

which denies that women and art are more than commodities: "You find no

difficulty in tolerating him. then?- you have a perfect respect for a political

platitudinarian as insensible as an ox to everything he can't tum into political

capital" (207). Catherine as well interrogates the system which reduces

human experience and fufillment to monetary tenns:

Why is it to be expected of an heiress that she should carry the property gained in trade into the hands of a certain class? That seems to me ridiculous mish-mash of superannuated customs and false

Klesmer demonstrates the same dismay as Ruskin at the willingness of men in power to let al1 decisions, preferences and interactions to be based on monetary gain. Klesmer notes the Yack of idealism in English politics, which left al1 mutuality between distant races to be deterrnined simply by the need of a market: the Crusades, to his mind, had at least this excuse, that they had a banner of sentiment which generous feelings could rally: of course, the scoundrels rallied too, but what then? They rally in equal force round your advertisment van of 'Buy cheap, seIl dear'" (205-206).

ambition. I should cal1 it a public evil. People had better make a new sort of public good by changing their ambitions." (21 1)

Like Alcharisi, Klesmer and Catherine make claims for a way of life within art,

which contributes to comrnunity while at the same time exceeding the law of

exchange. The ambitions which Gwendolen's family have for her also fall into

this economy of "political capital" rejected by Catherine. Once her farnily's

fortune has been lost and Grandcourt still proposes, her family sees

Gwendolen as deeply in debt to Grandcourt. In fact, Gwendolen is doubly

obligated; Her uncle, like Catherine's parents, insists that she is obligated to

her family to marry on the basis of her money.

A number of characten in Daniel Deronda operate solely within an

exchangist economy. Eliot establishes al1 of Grandcourt's relationships in

terms of property and the creation of obligation. His desire for mastery

extends into al1 of his relationships. He uses his position as a man with

property to engage in games of profit and loss, always sure that his initial

investment will be retumed. Eliot shows this within his relationship with his

mistress Mrs. Glasher. Before his marnage, Grandcourt visits Mrs. Glasher in

order to reacquire the diamonds he has given her. When they begin to argue,

Grandcourt asserts his complete control over her by invoking her continuing

obligation to him:

"Of course, if you like, you can play the mad woman," said Grandcourt, with sono voce scom. "It is not to be supposed that you will wait to think what good will come of it- or what you owe to me." He was in a state of disgust and embittement quite new in the history of their relation to each other. It was undeniable that this woman whose life he had allowed to send such deep suckers into his had a terrible power of annoyance in her; and the rash hurry of his

proceedings had left her opportunities open. His pnde saw very ugiy possibilities threatening it. And he stood for several minutes in silence reviewing the situation- considering how he could act upon her.. .. As Sir Hugo has said of him, Grandcourt knew how to play his cards. (295-296)

Like Casaubon's attitude to Will in Middlemarch, Grandcourt wishes to have

controlling interest in his relationship with Mn. Glasher; he decides when and

where they will meet. Lydia has less capital than Grandcourt because

Grandcourt is her only Yriend" and without his financial assistance, she

cannot maintain the Iifestyle to which she has become accustomed, and her

children will suffer (293). By only being able to conceive of his relationships

in ternis of exchange and mastery, Grandcourt must continually reassert his

power by binding people closer to himself.

Metaphors of obligation and constraint swirl around Gwendolen and

Grandcourt's courtship and marnage, which is figured in ternis of creating and

sustaining "attachmentn(261). lndeed the images of the grasping hand of

exchangist economy of Middlemarch reoccur in Daniel Deronda. Gillian Beer

notes: ''The image of throttling, of neck and strangling hands, moves to and

fro obsessively between the discourse associated with Grandcoufl and

G wendolenn (220). As well, Gwendolen and Grandcourt both gamble4,

emphasizing their desire to take up the position of spender, with full

confidence that they will either receive returns on their initial investment or

create obligation that can never be repaid, thus maintaining control. Up until

their marriage, both believe that they can assume the position of the receiver.

4 Like the capacity to hold a feast in Adam Bede, garnbling signifies the ability to squander a great deaf of capital without losing any power.

The narrator reflects that Grandcourt %as not jealous of anything unless it

threatened his mastery- which he did not think himself likely to lose" (274).

Initially, Gwendolen is equally confident in her ability to master situations; she

feels "well equipped for the mastery of life" (31). As Daniel points out,

gambling denies the gambler's place in a social context of exchange in which

one peson's gain results in another's loss. Within the opening section of the

novel, Gwendolen's gambling parallels the necessity residing in the laws of

exchange which deny a larger context. Eliot illustrates that like gambling, the

assertion of beginning can at best be an outline of ignorance. Gwendolen's

initial moments of gambling represent her desire and belief that she can

master and maintain the attention of others. It is only when Gwendolen sees

herself within a context riddled with limitation and forces acting upon her that

she realises the costs of gambling. Gambling then can be seen as a form of

the poisonous gift. Giving and gambling out of hand have disastrous results.

Eliot shows the basis for many of Gwendolen's expectations in the

plots of the romance novels she has read. Like the characters in Eliot's essay

"Silly Novels By Lady Novelists," Gwendolen is deluded into thinking she has

autonomy within her social context. The nanator of Daniel Deronda makes it

clear that Gwendolen's expectations of being an equal player within this kind

of economy are ill-founded. Encouraged to believe that she is exceptional

and talented, Gwendolen is nonetheless forced into a marriage with

Grandcourt based on exchangist economics, but she does not and cannot

possess any of the capital needed to play. Eliot shows that Gwendolen's

attempted adoption, through the influence of romance novels, of an

exchangist economy is completely unrealistic. Gwendolen, like Grandcourt,

fears participating in transactions in which she might incur debts that she will

be unable to reciprocate. She wishes to bind people close to her through her

beauty and chann and becomes uneasy when she is not being acknowledged

as originary. She becomes angry and despondent when she perceives that

another person's will creates an obligation for her to respond. She cannot

handle Rex's declaration of love because it will force her to take up a position

in which she must respond to his patronage. Similarly, when she bnefly must

contemplate becoming a govemess, the expectations her future employer

might have conceming her infuriate her: "the speech of others on any subject

seemed unreasonable. because it did not include her feeling and was an

ignorant daim on hef (232). Within exchangist econorny, other members of

the community become reduced to an extension of will of the receiver as

rnanifested within Grandcourt and Gwendolen's attitudes towards those

around them. 60th imagine that people exist in order to provide them with an

audience. While Grandcourt's behaviour is depicted as morally reprehensible

because of its selfish narrowness, Gwendolen's expectations are illusory.

Gwendolen, while asserting her power to predict the future and to

anticipate the expectations of others, is continually undermined and

dislocated. The narrator shows that while Gwendolen asserts her wish to be

an adventuress and do exactly what she pleases, she does not for one instant

believe that she will not be treated as a princess. But, Gwendolen becomes

entrapped as an object of exchange within the capitalist marnage market.

Eliot depicts moments in which Gwendolen loses her sense of mastery.

Grandcourt provokes moments of surprise. blushing and hesitation that

parallel other moments in which she feels completely out of control, such as

at the reenactment of Hermione, her uneasiness with the night sky, or her

inability to deal with poverty. Perhaps the most significant depiction of

Gwendolen's loss of her sense of mastery occurs when Grandcourt arranges

for her to have the diamonds. In this instance, a gift given to the already

heavily indebted Gwendolen becomes a symbol for Grandcourt's continued

power over her. A poisonous gift, the diamonds bind her even closer to him.

In her essay "Castration or Decapitation?," Cixous envisions an

economy independent from the coercion and linearity of the law of retum.

She depicts an economy allowing for the possibility of giving without

expectation of return. As Lewis Hyde, in The Gifi: Imagination and the Erotic

Life of Properly, notes, the possibility of a genuine gift is one of the bonding

forces in the establishment of community, since 'any exchange, be it of ideas

or goats, will tend towards the gift if it is intended to recognise, establish, and

maintain community" (78). As David Mana Hesse demonstrates in George

Eliot and Auguste Comte, Eliot shares Comte's concem for overall community

organisation and interaction. Moral, mental and social maturity cornes with

"an awareness of the interior lives of othen. This can only corne about by

being able to differentiate critically between the self and the other, by seeing

al1 human life as something more than an extension of one's will, but rather

conceiving oneself as subordinated to the sum total of the other in moral,

emotional, and social importance" (405).

Through the character of Daniel. Eliot both provides an example of a

generous economy and explores the implications of a morally, mentally and

socially mature individual still surrounded by an exchange economy. Daniel

struggles to give genuine gifts with disappointing or unpredictable results. As

the narratar notes:

It is a peculiar test of a man's metal when. after he has painfully adjusted himself to what seems a wise provision, he finds alf his mental precaution a little beside the mark, and his excellent intentions no better than miscalculated dovetails, accurately cut from a wrong starting-point. His magnanimity has got itself ready to meet misbehaviour. and finds quite a different cal1 upon it. (391)

As, I discussed earlier, it is difficult to give gifts to magnanimous individuals.

Because few characters in the narrative possess the same capacity of active

sympathy as Daniel few can engage in similar acts of "careful sailingn or

establish an account of genuine debt with him.

From the earliest moments of Daniel's childhood, he sympathises with

other people. Like Dorothea's in Middlemarch, Daniel's active sympathy is

often misunderstood by those around him: "Daniel had the stamp of rarity in a

subdued fervour of sympathy, an activity of imagination on behalf of others,

which did not show itself effusively, but was continually seen in acts of

considerateness that struck his companions as moral eccentncity"(l51).

Daniel, wishing to sustain a generous economy, continually worries about

creating obligation when he chooses to help others. As he attempts to figure

out how to communicate with Mirah after stopping her from drowning herself,

he is "mute: to question her seemed an unwarrantable freedom; he shrank

from appearing to claim the authority of a benefactor, or treat her with the less

reverence because she was in distress" (1 63). He demands nothing from

Mirah "with his usual activity of imagination as to how his conduct might affect

others" (1 92).Through Daniel's struggles to realize an economy of generosity,

Eliot shows that he is not without faults or limitations. He, tao, has some of

Grandcourt's 'self-assigned superiority"; however, Daniel's growing

consciousness of the ridiculousness of that position leads him to desire a

different kind of relationship:

He had always been leaned on instead of being invited to lean. Sometimes he had longed for the sort of friend to whorn he might possibly unfold his experience: a young man like himself who sustained a private grief and was not too confident about his own career; speculative enough to understand every moral difficulty, yet socially susceptible, as he himself was, and having every outward sign of equality either in bodily or in spiritual wrestling- for he had found it impossible to reciprocate confidences with one who looked up to him. But he had no expectation of meeting the friend he imagined. (403)

While Daniel attempts to resist a priest-like mentor position, other characters

within the naroive still perceive him as one. In this way. he often participates

in the exchangist economy in that his acts of charity place him in a space of

adulation, not unlike the relationship of Grandcourt to his various pets.

Daniel's generosity leads others to depend unhealthily on his genuine gifts

and genuine readings, rendering them poisonous.

Eliot portrays a number of Daniel's relationships moving f rom

exchangist mentoring to generous parting. Daniel's friendship with Hans

Meyrick shifts from one of charity to that of mutual giving. For much of the

narrative, Daniel nurtures and listens to Hans without receiving the same kind

of attention: the "relation of confidence on one side and indulgence on the

other had been developing in practice, as is wont to be the case where such

spiritual borrowing and lending has been well begun" (391). When he returns

to London to find Hans firmly in love with Mirah, Daniel is unable to express

his own feelings for her. In frustration, Daniel is conscious:

of that peculiar irritation which will sometimes befall the man whom others are inclined to trust as a mentor- the irritation of perceiving that he is supposed to be entirely off the same plane of desire and temptation as those who confess to him. Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless: as if those were not often the best teachers who only yesterday got corrected for their mistakes. (397)

Daniel cannot eclipse his mentor status immediately. He must leam to

relinquish some of his power by speaking to Hans of his love for Mirah.

Daniel's confession allows Hans to participate within an economy of

generosity. By telling Daniel that Mirah is jealous of Gwendolen, Hans

imparts a gift without any expectation of retum, allowing him to move beyond

his role of rescued prodigal. With Mordecai as well, Daniel can participate in

a friendship based on a mutual diffused giving. The two participate in a

friendship which does not involve a simple extension of will but the active

acknowledgement of the needs and stniggles of each other.

Within Daniel Deronda, Eliot attempts to show ways in which not only

friendship but art can instigate a generous economy outside of monetary

reductionism. Klesrner and Catherine support a community of artists within

the narrative, based on talent rather than finance causing the interaction of

people along and within different channels of exchange. As with gifts, the

appreciation and accepting of art requires "careful sailing." After Klesmer

assesses Mirah's singing ability they exchange a Gerrnan idiom which Mirah

translates as "it is safer to do anything - singing or anything else - before

those who know and understand al1 about ity' (41 7). But as with the prodigality

of nature in Mill on the Floss, art, too, because of interpretation has an

inherent prodigality.

Within Daniel Deronda, Eliot provides texts about giving which

stimulate multiple readings, demonstrating that interacting with texts produces

excesses that can never be fully adopted or explained in tenns of equal

retums. One of these stories appears in relation to Daniel and his ethics of

giving. At one point, Hans provides the story of Boudha giving himself to a

famished tigress so that she can feed her Young. When Mirah attempts to

compare Daniel to the Bouddha, he stops her:

"Pray don? imagine that," said Deronda, who had lately been finding such suppositions rather exasperating. "Even if it were true that I thought so much of others, it would not follow that I had no wants for myself. When Boudha let the tigress eat him he might have been hungry himself." "Perhaps if he was starved he would not mind so much about being eaten," said Mab, shyly. "Please don? think that, Mab; it takes away the beauty of the action," said Mirah. "But if it were true, Mirah?" said the rational Amy, having a half-holiday from her teaching; "you always take what is beautiful as if it were true." "So it is," said Mirah, gently. "If people have thought what is the most beautiful and the best thing, it must be true. It is always there." "Now, Mirah, what do you mean?" said Amy. "1 understand her," said Deronda, coming to the rescue. "It is a truth in thought though it may never have been carried out in action. It lives as an idea. Is that it?" He tumed to Mirah, who was listening with a blind look in her lovely eyes.

"lt must be that, because you understand me, but I cannot quite explain," said Mirah, rather abstractedly - still searching for some expression. "But was it beautiful for Bouddha to let the tiger eat him?" said Amy, changing her ground. 'lt would be a bad pattern." "The world would get full of fat tigen," said Mab.

Deronda laughed, but defended the myth. "It is like a passionate word," he said; the exaggeration is a flash of fervour. It is an extreme image of what is happening every day - the transmutation of self." (399-400)

With the discussion of texts, a challenge to modes of thinking occurs: an

expenditure of signification, which consumes existing modes of

cornmodification and exchange. In this instance both exchange economy and

generous economy become open to interpretation. Eliot shows the difficulty

of representing an ideal moment of generosity. Any attempt to represent a

genuine gift within a system of exchange or "transmutation," questions the

existence of motiveless generosity or vengeance. As with Dorothea's

desire/ability to interpret the world generously, a living idea, such as

generosity, can affect material reality. Eliot, however, also shows the dangers

in assuming a single interpretation is correct, as her laughter at Herbert

Spencer's unwillingness to consider the specificity of flowers demonstrates.

Her ability to provide the commentary of more than one character in this

scene shows that beauty, like the continuum of utility and luxury, is

continuously open to interpretation. Mirah's daim that Deronda understands

her offers further irony in the limitations of a single interpretation. As the plot

continues, Deronda's reading of Mirah proves limited; he must rely on Hans'

interpretation for his happiness.

If the recognition of genuine gifts cornes down to a matter of

interpretation, Gwendolen and Daniel's relationship forms upon the

misinterpretations of both. Still struggling with the appropriate way to

undermine the law of exchange, Daniel in the opening pages of the narrative

retums the gambling Gwendolen her necklace. Gwendolen. believing herself

a commodity trader rather than a commodity to be traded, misreads Daniel's

return of her necklace. She imrnediately trames Daniel's action in ternis of

trade and a loss of pride:

He had taken an unpardonable liberty. and had dared to place her in a thoroughîy hateful position. What could she do?- Not, assuredly, act on her conviction that it was he who had sent her the necklace, and straightway send it back to him:.. .He knew very well that he was entangling her in helpless humiliation: it was another way of srniling at her ironically, and taking the air of a supercilious mentor. (14)

Gwendolen cannot imagine any kind of transaction that does not conform to

the laws of exchange. Daniel's actions, coupled with his active sympathy,

force him to interact with Gwendolen inside of her expectations. He

participates in a series of exchanges with Gwendolen in which she demands

his attentions and opinions based on the initial return of the necklace.

The trajectory of Gwendolen's development parallels the Comtean

movement from selfish insularity to a recognition of the modes and feelings of

others. Daniel advises Gwendolen:

Look on other lives beside your own. See what their troubles are, and how they are borne. Try to care about something in this vast wodd besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care for what is best in thought and action- something that is good apait from accidents of your own lot. (383)

Not until the end of the narrative does Daniel force Gwendolen to give up her

priestly vision of him. She comes ta realise that Daniel does not exist only in

the moments in which they interact. The transformation in Gwendolen's

character represents a movement from an exchangist economy to one of

diffused generosity and parting. She is able to first recognise and then

soothe some of Daniel's feelings of grief. Upon Daniel and Mirah's wedding

Gwendolen writes:

Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding-day. 1 have remembered your words- that I may live to be one of the best of women, who make others glad that they were bom. f do not see how that can be, but you know better than 1. If it ever comes true, it will be because you helped me. I only thought of myself, and I made you grieve. It hurts me now to think of your grief. You must not grieve any more for me. It is better- it shall be better with me because I have known you. (695)

The release of Daniel from direct responsibility for Gwendolen's emotional

and mental well-being allows Gwendolen to invoke her own parting. Like

Hans Meyrick, she tentatively moves towards the adoption of generosity

without expectation. Her duties at home are no longer a debt she must pay to

absolve herself from the guilt of her marriage. She, like Alcharisi, has enough

self-knowledge of her limitations that she can make decisions, admittedly

small, about her future duties.

Like gifts, duties must be able to be chosen: only within the possibility

and the freedom of denying a gift can one be received. In this way, Eliot

makes a striking statement about the limitations set in place on the

su bjectivity of individuals enmeshed in an exchange econorny. For women

characters, such as Gwendolen, Catherine and Alcharisi, there can be no true

"no", if there can be no true '+yesl'. Eliot. like Cixous. wants to rescue gift-

giving from the economic obligations forced upon it within exchangist

economics to reconfigure modes of giving within a narrative which does not

confine exchange to laws of inheritance and property. Ideally, the reading of

Iiterature exceeds an economy of exchange and on some level the economy

of ideas and meanings in which author and reader exchange sense and

knowledge. Like Eliot's letter to Martha Jackson in my introduction. the gift of

writing cannot be retumed or contained in a restricted fashion. Daniel denies

Gwendolen's desire and need to be told how to live, upsetting the habituation

of Grandcourt's exchangist regime; he insists that she assess and interpret

the needs of those around her herself. Rosemarie Bodenheirner relates the

ending of Daniel Deronda to Eliot's own desire to problematise the economy

of mentorship. She proposes that Eliot's "final action was an explicit

abandonment of the all-wise narrative voice that had promised so much to

many of her readersn(265). Like Gwendolen, the reader is given the genuine

gift of departure.

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