1. The Exception as “Sustaining Power”

My goal in this essay is to offer a revision of how we understand George Eliot's early novels and their relation to liberalism but also—within the limited space available—to at least hint at new ways of understanding Victorian realism more generally. Much of the recent work done on the Victorian novel receives its force from a broader theoretical movement in the humanities and social sciences rooted in Jürgen Habermas's critique of poststructuralism and his theories of communicative action.Footnote ³ Such work theorizes how we might overcome the political and epistemological relativisms of modern disenchantment by appealing to the authority of rational argumentation and abstract proceduralism.Footnote ⁴ Critics like Amanda Anderson, David Wayne Thomas, and Lauren Goodlad (among others) have provided very welcome alternatives to the for-too-long dominant understanding of the Victorian novel as engaged in the disciplining of subjectivity and the production of the liberal subject. Yet consensus seems to have swung back the other direction, and, as a result, realist novels like Eliot's—because of their narratives’ perceived tendencies to yoke together divergent points of view into a rational and manageable consensus—have come to be understood as modeling liberal political processes concomitant with the formation of a liberal pubic sphere in which legitimacy and justice are always the output of procedural practices. Thus Pericles Lewis can take as a given at the outset of a recent book on the modernist novel that the nineteenth-century “realist novel … represents a parliamentary, rather than an absolutist, conception of reality and truth.”Footnote ⁵ Lewis reflects a sort of commonsense view that the Victorian novel is invested in the potentially contentious but always more or less secure processes of hammering out a consensual, shared understanding. Yet I will argue here that the novels of Eliot demonstrate that procedural conceptions of consensual reality often depend on an absolutist tendency seemingly inscribed within their operation. Rational deliberation in Eliot's early work, rather than bending toward consensual understanding, is subordinated to or foreclosed by pre- or extradiscursive decision-making. Irrational or illiberal types of decision-making in Eliot's novels intervene as if by providence and tend to be formally manifest in the trappings of delegitimized generic types opposed to realism, such as romance.

Eliot's first novel, Adam Bede, provides perhaps the most obvious example of this type of generic intrusion. Condemned to die for the crime of infanticide, Hetty Sorrel, just before she reaches the gallows, is saved miraculously by “a horseman cleaving the crowd at full gallop.”Footnote ⁶ Arriving at “The Last Moment,” Arthur Donnithorne intercedes and—with the sheriff's pardon in hand—delivers to Hetty “a hard-won release from death” (503). Although Adam Bede has enjoyed a long and largely positive reception history, readers have nonetheless expressed nearly unanimous dissatisfaction with the formal problem posed by the novel's resolution. Because Arthur's intervention constitutes a moment of narrative transformation brought about by the sudden and disruptive introduction of romance, critics have tended to understand this event as symptomatic of Eliot's overreliance on outdated conventions and, consequently, as a sign of the author's artistic immaturity and her moral indecision.Footnote ⁷ However, the appearance in Eliot's fiction of supposedly primitive generic forms such as romance should not be so easily dismissed. The function of romance in Eliot can be understood, as Fredric Jameson has argued, as an “aesthetic rehearsal of the problematics of social value from a quite different mode of production.”Footnote ⁸ “The Last Moment” episode in Adam Bede is exemplary of the type of rehearsal Jameson describes: in a sort of mock-heroic gesture by Eliot, the written word displaces the conventional sword that Arthur-as-hero should carry; however, even as the sheriff's pardon stays the executioner's hand, Eliot wants us to understand that the note is nonetheless inscribed with all the disavowed violence of the law and of the state. Moreover, Eliot showcases here an occasion of extralegal action in which an outside agent intervenes providentially to resolve the legal and ethical complications stemming from Hetty's trial and, ultimately, her death sentence. With Arthur's intercession, Eliot appeals to the alien form of romance to resolve the aesthetic tensions of her realist novel. Thus, in my view, a proper understanding of Eliot's use of putatively outdated stylistic modes such as romance requires interpretations rendered in the language not of archaic modes but in the idiom of the modern discourses, and in light of those modern values with which Eliot has put them into conflict.Footnote ⁹ By looking beyond the tenets of realism to alternative generic forms in order to sustain their formal coherence, Eliot's novels provide counterexamples to those arguments that understand the Victorian novel as fostering liberal community and liberal governmental practices.

Another way of putting this is to say that in their emphasis on illiberal or irrational forms of authority, Eliot's early works recognize what Jürgen Habermas has more recently come to understand as a “perpetually recurring figure of thought” in secular rationalism, which, upon reflection, “discovers its origin in an alterity, whose fate-like-power it has to recognize if it is not to lose its rational orientation.”Footnote ¹⁰ Eliot's invocation of apparently providential agencies to overcome moments of crisis in her fiction signals a self-conscious concern with the sort of alterity that Habermas describes. Eliot's novels figure this otherness as a resource—an authority—that is at once embedded in and external to the normative operations of the liberal worlds her novels represent. In this way Eliot's realism reproduces what Habermas poses as a troubling possibility for liberal democratic procedure: that the “legal order cannot be legitimized self-referentially on the basis of democratically generated legal procedures alone” but “must look to some other ‘sustaining power’ for the cognitive assurance of the foundations of its validity.”Footnote ¹¹ Eliot's novels overcome the insecurities of their form by gravitating toward romance—realism's generic other—when moments of impasse threaten concrete resolutions. The generic anomalies of Eliot's fiction—in other words, those stylistic forms deemed incommensurate with realism—signal the author's aesthetic response to the ethical, political, and epistemic dilemmas with which her novels contend, problems that are difficult or impossible to resolve on the realist plane of representation. Faced with the often-untenable complications they themselves introduce, Eliot's novels tend to appeal for order to forms of authority extrinsic to the normative spheres of both their dominant modes of representation (realism) and their dominant value systems (liberal democratic). In the generic anomalies of Eliot's fiction, we see not just her awareness of liberalism's need for irrational forms of authority but also her sense that secular modernity cannot dispense with what might be called a genetic need for religious thinking. Such anomalies require recourse to religious or metaphysical forms to bridge the ethical, epistemological, and legal impasses with which Eliot's fiction is inevitably confronted.

Habermas's recognition that, in order to sustain itself, liberalism requires a power that is not “self-referential” recalls the controversial German legal scholar Carl Schmitt's concept of “the exception.” In doing so, Habermas reinvigorates Schmitt's well-known assertion that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”Footnote ¹² For Schmitt, the exception describes the intervention of an absolute sovereign agency in the form of a decision to induce “a normal situation” where there has been a crisis or “state of exception” (Political Theology 12–13). Because the exception has no normative referent—in other words, because it is the antithesis of the norm—the exception is pure alterity. It is not surprising, then, that Schmitt uses the language of religion to describe the function of the exception; because of “the sovereign's direct intervention in a valid legal order,” Schmitt argues the exception operates in a manner “analogous to the miracle in theology” (Political Theology 36). This stands to reason given that Schmitt's concept of the exception, emphasizing as it does the providential function of the sovereign decision, is rooted in the thinking of nineteenth-century Danish parson Søren Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard “the ethical is posited in the absolute choice,” and the absolute choice is one that has no referent beyond itself (Either/Or 76).Footnote ¹³ And as early as her “The Antigone and Its Moral” (1856), a short essay published three years prior to the release of Adam Bede, Eliot demonstrates a proto-Schmittian—which is to say, Kierkegaard-like—concern with the problem of legitimate decision-making, which Eliot understands is at the heart of Sophocles’ tragedy. Moreover, Eliot argues that the problems of legitimate decision-making and the limitations of sovereignty that form the “dramatic collision” of the play are hardly “foreign to modern sympathies” but are indeed recognizable in the seemingly insurmountable “antagonism of valid principles” that shape the conflicted nature of modern political and social life.Footnote ¹⁴ For Kierkegaard, it was precisely such antagonism that led to the indecision, and eventually the irony, that for him marred modern thinking: it is the “reality of choosing” rather than “that which is chosen” that for Kierkegaard constitutes the ethical, and only by a decisive leap of faith might one avoid being misled by the antagonism of valid claims (Either/Or 75).

In Antigone's and Creon's respective responses to the impossible challenges with which each is faced, we find examples of decision-making that align quite clearly with Kierkegaard, on one hand, and with Schmitt on the other. We also find, particularly in Antigone but also in Creon, examples of forms of agency and action that appear recursively in Eliot's fiction, as I will endeavor to show in what follows. It may be easy to see the influence of Antigone in the “leaps of faith” of Eliot's Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke but perhaps less easy to recognize how Eliot's novels are informed by a Creon-like reverence for authority, which subordinates “personal affection” to “the well-being of the state” or community (“The Antigone” 364). It is Eliot's careful reproduction of this conflict between “elemental tendencies” that makes, for example, Dorothea's actions heroic and Maggie's tragic. And for these reasons, both Kierkegaard and Schmitt make important contributions to this essay: Eliot's essay on Antigone and the novels that follow it make apparent that the concepts to which Schmitt and Kierkegaard gave a precise language were not at all foreign to Eliot, concerned as she was with the difficulties of judgment and decision-making—of legitimacy—that were exacerbated by the rise of mass democracy and the concomitant transformation of the liberal public sphere in the middle of the nineteenth century. For although Eliot had no philosophical language with which to describe the concept of the exception, she did have the generic idioms of romance and religion at her disposal, and it is in the emergence of these putatively outdated forms in her fiction that we can recognize the providential logic of the exception in her novels. The logic of the exception provides the means for Eliot to overcome the limitations of realism in the same way that, as her novels demonstrate, the exception functions as a sustaining power that forecloses conflict and questions of legitimacy in the political sphere.

2. Legitimacy and Crisis in Eliot

“The Antigone and Its Moral” confronts directly the problem of what might constitute the ground for legitimate decision-making in both the political and ethical spheres of action. Eliot's reading of Sophocles focuses on the drama's foregrounding of an indeterminate problem. Neither Creon nor Antigone can obey both of the conflicting yet valid laws to which each one is subject; each, in daring “to be right,” “must also dare to be wrong” (366). Eliot's reading goes against the prevailing reception of the play that understands Creon as a tyrannical villain and instead stresses that the sovereign could have not have acted otherwise than in the best interests of the state.Footnote ¹⁵ No less just, however, is Antigone's religious feeling and “sisterly piety” (364). The “dramatic collision” of the play thus derives from a situation in which “two principles”—the “duties of citizenship” and a dutiful “reverence for the gods”—“both having their validity, are at war” with each other (364). Faced with an actual state of exception—literally, a civil war—Creon and Antigone must each make a decision: each must choose who is friend and who is enemy. Partisanship, though it leads to conflict, is justified by the apparently righteous claim on which it is founded. At the same time, an inherent and unavoidable value pluralism means that “reformers, martyrs, revolutionists, are never fighting against evil only; they are also placing themselves in opposition to good” (365). Eliot argues that “the antagonism” of valid claims at the core of Sophocles’ tragedy persists in the social and political arrangements of every age (365). The political indeterminacy Eliot calls the “antagonism of valid principles” is hardly “peculiar to polytheism,” she asserts, but is also an inevitable component of modern social and political life (365). This concern over the conflicts that arise from ethical and political incommensurability inflects all of Eliot's work. In place of a normative consensus, or a sort of Habermasian lifeworld from which legitimate actions and authority derive as if organically, we find instead that Eliot's novels depend on conceptual indeterminacies that pivot upon either the intervention of a seemingly providential authority or the extrasocial, Kierkegaardian “absolute choice” of a central character.

I should make clear that I am not arguing Eliot is in some way illiberal or that her novels are not deeply concerned with Victorian culture's nascent liberal self-understanding. Rather, it is precisely because Eliot's novels do envision worlds dominated by liberal worldviews that they also formally reproduce the aporia “between norm and the decision” that Giorgio Agamben, the modern translator of Schmitt, has argued exists at the core of liberal democracy.Footnote ¹⁶ This aporia defines the state of exception: as a “limit concept,” Agamben argues, “the state of exception [is] the place where the opposition between the norm and its realization reaches its greatest intensity” (36). For Schmitt this irreducible opposition, this moment of “intensity,” is overcome in the form of a decision: the decision, itself sovereign, suspends the norm and in doing so brings about the conditions under which the norm can be realized. Lodged quietly and unnoticed within the norm, at the moment of intensity the decision comes forth to resolve impasse as if from on high, that is, in the form of providence. In the same way that Schmitt and Agamben argue the decision is inscribed within liberal norms, only to emerge in the moment of necessity, Eliot calls forth generic conventions that are putatively antithetical to realism at precisely those moments when political and ethical indeterminacies threaten her realism and her novel's will to form. On one hand, the logic of the exception in Eliot can take expressly juridical forms in her work, as it does in the legal drama of Adam Bede, in which state power must intervene as a sovereign agent to decide the intractable problem of Hetty's fate for the community of Hayslope. On the other hand, the function of the exception in Eliot's fiction can appear as a more overtly supernatural (and extradiegetic) aesthetic manifestation—such as the biblical flood in The Mill on the Floss or Arthur's romantic ride into Stoniton to save Hetty in Adam Bede—which resolves by apparently providential means the ethical and legal impasses that constitute the aesthetic tensions of these novels.

The central conflicts motivating the plot of Adam Bede result from the clandestine relationship of the beautiful but vacuous milkmaid, Hetty Sorel, and the swashbuckling local squire's son, Arthur Donnithorne. Hetty becomes pregnant and, faced with a legitimacy problem all too familiar to readers of Victorian fiction, goes into hiding and gives birth in secret. Hetty ultimately exposes her child, leaving it to die under a nut tree. Once her crime is discovered, the sleepy borough is brought to the point of crisis, and a legal drama ensues that brings into relief problems of political and legal legitimacy, as evidenced in the “On the Eve of the Trial” episode. Here an argument between Adam and Mr. Irwine dramatizes the conflict of values that for Eliot results from what in “The Natural History of German Life” (1856) she had called the “consentaneous development” of opposing social systems.Footnote ¹⁷ Irwine and Adam's disagreement reproduces the conceptual antimony, which we tend to conceive of as a historical problem, between positive and natural law and in doing so emphasizes an essential problem of legitimacy at the core of the novel. Adam's honor-bound, chivalric desire for vengeance against Donnithorne perceives violence as a means justified by the apparent righteousness of the intended results of that violence: “I only want justice … if there's a just God, [Arthur] shall feel what it is t’ ha’ brought a child like her to sin and misery” (459). Irwine's secular rationalism attempts to counter Adam's feudal call for a “revenge” that equates to “justice.” Irwine reminds Adam that when he is “calm” and deliberative he “has a mind that can understand fully” that “it is not for us men to apportion the shares of moral guilt and retribution” (460). Irwine's words emphasize the contradiction that has surfaced during their argument: if not “men,” who, then, is to “apportion … retribution”? Irwine's response to this impasse—a moment of palpable indecision—contains a plea for an interceding agency and echoes Adam's earlier, rather uncertain supplication for “a just God” to intervene against Arthur. Like Adam (and despite his call for rational deliberation), Irwine appears to call out for a resolution that can only come from beyond the normative operations of the community. The argument between Arthur and the rector illustrates Eliot's grasp of the legitimacy problem at the core of modern formulations of authority, which Walter Benjamin, in his “Critique of Violence,” describes as a “circular argument” by which “natural law attempts, by the justness of ends, to ‘justify’ means, [and] positive law to ‘guarantee’ the justness of the ends through the justification of the means.”Footnote ¹⁸ Eliot's novel ultimately provides a response to this impasse, and to Irwine's plea, in the unexplained agency of the state, which is instantiated physically by the magistrate presiding over Hetty's trial, but in whose “decision” we can understand the emergence of law as a “metaphysical category.”Footnote ¹⁹ The legal procedures brought to bear against Hetty in Adam Bede are vested with a providential authority.

Moreover, while Arthur's climactic, mock-heroic ride into Stoniton to save Hetty from the gallows operates as an overt deus ex machina, it is little different in its form and function in the novel than the magistrate's intervention in Hetty's trial. In fact, as a more or less arbitrary reversal of a previous legal decision, the latter moment in Adam Bede is a striking instance of sovereign decisionism, of “the merciful lord who proves by pardons and amnesties his supremacy over his own laws” (Schmitt, Political Theology 38). Viewed in this light, we detect within the allegorical spread of Eliot's novel the appearance of absolutist values that are fundamentally antithetical to the liberal democratic values that by midcentury dominated England (even as, as the century wore on, many Victorians increasingly saw a role for the state in private life). By countermanding a previous legal decision, Arthur's romantic intervention brings into relief the contradictory and above all arbitrary quality of the state's decisive legal intervention against Hetty earlier in the novel. Again, while the outcomes are opposed, the formal operations of these two pivotal moments in the novel are the same: each depends on a legal decision emanating from the “inexplicable identity” of an agency not subject to the laws it enforces (38). This unexplained, intervening agency is the hallmark of the exception, of a “state [that] intervenes everywhere” and, in doing so, Schmitt argues, “acts in many disguises but always as the same invisible person” (38). The argument between Adam and Irwine, the state's intervention in the case against Hetty, and Arthur's ride into Stoniton are all responses to legitimacy crises that Eliot presents explicitly in terms of authority and identity. These crises of authority, which hinge on questions of who will decide, ultimately call for the intercession of the state as a quasitheological agency, which is evidenced by Hetty's trial as well as Arthur's final and miraculous intervention to save Hetty. Drawing analogies such as these between Schmitt's critique of the liberal state and the formal repetition of exceptional interventions in Eliot's fiction helps us better understand Eliot's artistic reaction to the political and historical legitimacy crises to which the metaphysics of the exception in her novels is a symbolic response.

In the state of exception, the sovereign agent interposes its decision, Schmitt argues, in a manner “analogous to the miracle in theology” (Political Theology 36). But because the operation of the sovereign decision is precisely antithetical to the deliberative ideals that underwrite the liberal democratic ethos, “the state of exception,” writes Giorgio Agamben, “appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism” (3). The exception defines when and where laws begin and end, and which functions precisely in the absence or, more specifically, the suspension of juridical norms (4). The persistence within modern liberalism of this marginal space of indeterminacy has prompted Vincent Pecora to identify the “irreducibility of the decision” as the seminal “conceptual aporia” of modern constitutional democracies.Footnote ²⁰ Agamben has gone so far as to follow Benjamin in arguing that the “state of exception … has become the rule” and as such “the constitutive paradigm” of the modern “juridical order” (6–7). Schmitt himself understood the force of these contradictions, which produce in liberal democracy, he argued, a “huge cloak-and-dagger drama” in which the exception is called forth “as a deus ex machina, to decide according to positive statute a controversy that the independent act of juristic perception failed to bring to a generally plausible solution” (Political Theology 38). This clandestine “drama” plays out in Eliot's novels and is recognizable in the miraculous interventions and redemptive transfigurations that lend to Eliot's early fiction the characteristics of providence.Footnote ²¹

Hetty's trial scene in Adam Bede dramatizes the providential quality of the exception. Religious allusion inflects the tone of the legal procedures with a ritual mystique, while the setting itself formally reproduces the paradoxical processes by which the legal procedures themselves are made sacred. Eliot sets the trial and verdict scenes in the ruins of a “grand old” gothic hall, where “the mid-day light that fell on the close pavement of human heads, was shed through the high pointed windows, variegated with the tints of old painted glass” (468). Dominating “The Verdict” chapter, “like a dozing, indistinct dream of the past,” is a sense of England's feudal history (468). The ritualized and highly aestheticized feel of the environment only intensifies as the trial scene progresses. Before reading the verdict, the “judge puts on his black cap,” signifying the severity of the sentence, as simultaneously the “chaplain in his canonicals was observed behind him” (474). The chaplain's presence lends to the judge what Max Weber called “charismatic authority,” which is the “direct antithesis” of “rational, and particularly bureaucratic authority” because “charismatic authority is specifically irrational in the sense of being foreign to all rules” (361). In “The Verdict” scenes, Eliot posits rational bureaucracy as requiring the legitimizing power of a supernatural presence. Eliot conflates these two forms of authority and in doing so gestures to the theological character of that “inexplicable identity” corresponding to the sovereign exception, which underwrites the legal actions her novel depicts. Put another way, the trial scene collapses the distinction between ritual and the rational or procedural, and in doing so exposes an instance in which “the state acts in many disguises but always as the same invisible person” (Schmitt, Political Theology 38). By emphasizing the overlap of these two modes of political and legal authority, Eliot reveals how putatively normative, procedural operations appear to exist—contrary to procedural rationality—in an essential synergy with the exception.

The reaction of the crowd as it awaits the court's judgment of Hetty Sorrel underscores the ritual quality of the putatively deliberative proceedings Eliot describes in the novel. Stilled instantly by an ominous “knock” that “fell as a signal for silence on every ear,” the narrator observes: “[I]t is sublime—that sudden pause of a great multitude, which tells that one soul moves in them all” (474–75). At the moment of decision Eliot communicates simultaneously both consensus and a period of palpable indecision, or crisis, prior to the decisive judgment. The “sudden pause” registers accord and the deferral that is commonly seen as the hallmark of parliamentary democracy by its critics. Prior to the judge's decision, when “the decisive moment was not far off,” there is a palpable “rustling, whispering, and low buzzing” as “everyone had some feeling or opinion to express in under-tones” (473–74). This narrative “pause” is the formal embodiment of the legal and metaphysical gap that Schmitt posits between procedure and decision, between law and justice. The “moment of decision” forecloses this impasse (473). The exception eludes understanding up until the moment when its supreme legislative function produces, as if by magic, only clarity and understanding. The crowd moves with “one soul” only once the judge's decision is truly imminent and thus can appear to be socially immanent. The decision, like the “miracle in theology,” redeems an irredeemable situation.

A similarly explicit articulation of the exception's political and legal function occurs in Eliot's Felix Holt (1866) when, in an effort to halt the Treby riot, the town rector rides out “to read the Riot Act.”Footnote ²² Though the novel can hardly be grouped among Eliot's early works, Felix Holt is illustrative of Eliot's persistent concern with the problem of just what constitutes legitimate authority in the democratizing world. Amidst an intensifying disorder, the rector's proclamation momentarily stills the crowd, which responds with a “comparative silence” as the ritual symbolic announcement “God save the King!” punctuates the reading of the act (312). There is a pause as the crowd recognizes the existence of a sovereign agency, of a power, albeit waning, manifest in the words of the deputized sovereign agent. The crowd's pause, their indecision, is the recognition of, and response to, a certain indeterminacy: from what source, from which agency, does authority derive? Certainly the novel provides no easy answer to this question. Much as in Adam Bede, where Arthur's appearance as the diminished romantic hero bespeaks the aristocracy's fading importance as a structuring principle of English society, the Treby riot in Felix Holt (like the novel as a whole) communicates the intensity of the legitimation crisis at the core of English political and social life in the wake of the nineteenth-century reform bills. And yet, whereas the reading of the 1714 Riot Act does not have the hoped-for effect (the crowd does not ultimately disperse), by effectively creating a condition of martial law the pronouncement does in fact create the grounds for a form of political legitimacy and does so specifically by resolving a problem of identity. The naming of a state of exception, signified by the reading of the Riot Act as if it devolved from God and king, effectively and arbitrarily redefines the identity of the rioters: should any persons still be in the open one hour after the act is read, those persons are transformed, as if magically, into enemies of the state. This transfiguration—providential to the core—produces instantaneously a partisan clarity in Treby. Reading the Riot Act brings about a situation that Schmitt would call political, or a social sphere organized by the explicit opposition of friend and enemy. In Felix Holt, the state acts in a disguised or proxy form; the invocation of the sovereign works as a metaphor for a state intervention that is ultimately metaphysical in its operation and effect.

Felix Holt explicitly reflects England's deeply felt anxiety regarding authority and social order resulting from the broader extension of the franchise to the working classes with the Reform Act of 1867, so it is perhaps not a surprise to find in this novel an invocation of an exceptional state power (such as we find explicit in the contemporaneous writings by Matthew Arnold that would eventually become Culture and Anarchy). One might think that Eliot's representation in Felix Holt of a type of politics that could be understood as Schmittian is itself exceptional or anomalous, yet we've seen Eliot contend specifically with the sovereign character of state authority in “The Antigone and Its Moral.” Similarly, “The Verdict” chapter of Adam Bede had demonstrated Eliot's concern with the formally metaphysical operation of the sovereign decision some seven years before the publication of Felix Holt. In both earlier works Eliot emphasizes that the providential quality of the sovereign decision is antithetical to a rational liberal ethos that comprehends deliberative decision-making and thus public opinion as the principal form of authority and the means by which right would triumph over might. Schmitt had directed his readers to this essential tension when he equated the exception with the transfiguring power of the miracle in religion and romance. In the same way that modern deism rejects supernatural interventions of any kind, so too does procedural rationality recoil from the arbitrary exigency of the exception. This is so, according to Schmitt, because liberal jurisprudence is based in a “pattern of thinking that is characteristic of the natural sciences” and as such rejects “all ‘arbitrariness,’ and attempts to banish from the realm of the human mind every exception” (Political Theology 41). Schmitt knew what Habermas has subsequently come to accept: that liberal rationality defines itself through its relationship to the exception even as liberalism disavows the importance of the exception's existence—and its function. The concomitance of rational liberal practices and the exception presents a significant paradox for liberalism, and, as I've been arguing, Eliot demonstrates early in her career an acute awareness of this problem.Footnote ²³ In Adam Bede, as we've seen, the “sphere of law,” and the inexplicable agency prosecuting that law, effectively “exceeds the law” (Agamben 11). The law's function, and the normative order that law is meant to preserve, hinges fundamentally on a decisive act that is ultimately irreducible to procedural rationality. Indeed, procedure is in this case defined by a flexibility to suspend and exceed norms. This is the paradox that Eliot evokes for her readers in Adam Bede: because the exception refers only to itself and requires a leaving behind of all legal and procedural abstraction, every actual, concrete application of the law—every legal decision—in effect constitutes a state of emergency. Eliot demonstrates that realism, understood as the correlate of liberal rationality, also requires the flexibility to suspend norms when confronted with an aesthetic impasse. In this way, the generic inconsistencies of Eliot's fiction illuminate the crises of authority at the heart of nineteenth-century liberal self-understanding.

3. Exceptional Agency and Eliot's Providential Aesthetic

Eliot's concern with the immanence of the exception in liberal decision-making finds its expression in the formal function of providential authority in her fiction. And the importance of providential thinking in Eliot has not gone entirely unnoticed. Writing of what he calls the “providential aesthetic” in Victorian fiction, Thomas Vargish argues: “[T]he incorporation of a providential intention is … essential to the mimetic function of the novel, is inseparable from the representation of reality.”Footnote ²⁴ That a providential “design” could not but be reproduced in the form of the novel whose authors found the operations of such a design so apparent in the world around them is true for Vargish of Victorian fiction until Eliot, in whose novels the providential aesthetic is “exploited … in the interests of a structural unity” (164). In Eliot this design undergoes “an ironic transformation” in which the “chief thematic and structural convention of the English novel [is] adapted to the representation of a reality uninformed by the premises upon which it is founded” (165). I agree with Vargish up to this point, yet it is important to understand that Eliot's emplotment of providential authority in her fiction is not merely performative but is in fact immanent to the function of the realist novel. Eliot's ironic appropriation of the providential aesthetic is not simply an “indictment of these ways of reading the world” (165), as Vargish argues, but constitutes her recognition of the complex imbrication of two conflicting modalities for understanding the world, which casts into doubt the autonomy—and thus the legitimacy—of each. And this overlap, which Eliot's fiction points up through her ironic reproduction of a providential aesthetic, is not only or merely a historical or political problem; it is a cognitive phenomenon that the historical processes of secularization force into stark relief. Eliot's novels seem to query to what extent—in its efforts to leave religious thinking behind—secular modernity produces a sort of epistemological vacuum, an aporia that is quickly refilled by religious forms and metaphysics. So while Eliot was throughout her writing career increasingly committed to a secular, liberal worldview, she was also enough of a committed thinker to have not lost sight in her novels of the role religious thinking plays as an epistemological resource extending into multiple modes of living.

The types of dramatic social, political, and epistemic change with which Eliot's novels tend to be concerned are what ultimately demand alternative means of formalizing and thus comprehending such change. As intimated in my brief earlier treatment of Felix Holt, that novel (and perhaps even more so her 1868 “Address to the Working Men, by Felix Holt”) makes explicit Eliot's misgivings regarding the socially and politically destabilizing repercussions of burgeoning democracy. In these works, Eliot makes some rather Burkean prescriptions regarding what she sees as the legitimating power of a shared cultural history and the state's role in protecting the “common estate of society.”Footnote ²⁵ Eliot's dramatization of the exception in Felix Holt underscores the importance of a centralized state authority, which intervenes at the moment when historical fictions promulgating national identity and a sense of belonging are no longer sufficient to motivate social cohesion on their own. However, these works do not constitute Eliot's only or final word on the effects of democratization, and it is significant that these writings appear after and as a more or less specific response to the Second Reform Act. Eliot's reaction to the social and political insecurities produced by democratization and the crisis of authority in England is more complicated than an essay like “Address to the Working Men” might lead one to believe. After all, it was in the persona of Felix Holt, a character more conservative than “radical,” that Eliot had made her most ardent claims for the preservation of public order. Likewise, it is in the agricultural communities of her early novels like Adam Bede that many readers see an expression of Eliot's own trenchant conservatism. Elaine Hadley suggests that George Eliot's “fictions of the recent past” gesture “nostalgically toward a social consensus” in which forms of sympathetic judgment are aided by the more stable identity-making procedures available to the subject in a homogenous social setting.Footnote ²⁶ Even Vargish, who argues that Eliot's use of the providential aesthetic is ironic, arrives at the incompatible conclusion that Adam Bede is “a cheering and by 1859 nostalgic affirmation of belonging in a community that is strong enough to tolerate the inevitable diversity, insisted upon throughout the novel, of conduct and conviction among its membership” (182). Vargish fails to see that this affirmation—the reconstitution of what Hadley calls a “social consensus”—is entirely dependent on the exertion of the state's providential authority and is only maintained by the quasiritual expulsion of Hetty Sorrel from the community of Hayslope.

While maintaining connections with the past is always critical in Eliot, she herself argued that her position “is as far as possible from the folly of supposing that the sun will go backward on the dial, because we put the hands of our clock backward.”Footnote ²⁷ In fact, both Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss provide ample evidence that the promesse de bonheur implied by Eliot's historical similitudes only ever functions as an antagonistic foil, a novelistic construction against which the existing world will be judged and which in this way works to undermine the potentially totalizing arrangements of historical narrative. Despite the apparent timelessness of Eliot's pastoral reality in Adam Bede, no reader can miss the profusion of historical dates or the near constant ticking of clocks that sound throughout Adam Bede. The ticking clocks of Adam Bede are the reader's reminder that history, so to speak, is approaching in the form of crisis. Amidst chapters entitled “Crisis” and “A Dilemma,” Eliot links individual experience with history writ large: “Europe adjusts itself to a fait accompli, and so does the individual character—until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution” (276). And from an allegorical perspective, it is not difficult to see the events of Adam Bede as an interruption of a progressive historiography that takes the shape of a secular theodicy. “So good comes of evil,” Arthur muses, “such is the beautiful arrangement of things” (342). Arthur's providential thinking is also historical thinking; both are forms of authority upon which Eliot seeks to cast doubt. Arthur is the vestige of a feudal past that the novel seeks to devalue as a legitimate source of authority, even as Eliot calls into question what comes in its place. After all, it is the physical instantiation of Donnithorne illegitimacy—Arthur and Hetty's child—that is the root cause of the crisis at the center of the novel. And Adam Bede’s eponymous hero may well be Eliot's earliest novelistic avatar of the necessity of measured change.

Neither a “philosopher” nor a “proletaire with democratic ideas,” Adam has “no theories about setting the world to rights” but instead is “inclined to admit of all established claims unless he saw very clear grounds for questioning them” (179). Still, there is something of Antigone in Adam Bede as well. Despite being “susceptible to the influence of rank,” Adam nonetheless discovers “clear grounds” to question established authority in the form of Arthur Donnithorne (179). The “strength” of Adam's “moral sense” “brings him into opposition with the rules that society has sanctioned” (“The Antigone” 366). Adam's clearly valid claim against Arthur leads to a violent “crisis,” which not only has immediate and significant ramifications within the action of Adam Bede but also very apparent political and historical—even revolutionary—repercussions within the allegorical or symbolic sphere of the novel. There is an energetic tension in Eliot's novel between the nostalgic longing for that ready sympathy which reinforces understanding and in doing so bonds community, and the inevitable incommensurability of valid claims that disrupt the community's will to form (and ultimately the form of the novel itself). This dialectic is very much the explicit focus of Eliot's early writing, such as the Antigone essay and her essay on Riehl's “The Natural History of German Life,” so it stands to reason that we should be able to identify this dynamic as being of formal importance to the novels written nearest to this period. This is certainly the case with The Mill on the Floss, which focuses on the “suffering, whether of martyr or victim,” that is the fate of those “that in the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the generation before them.”Footnote ²⁸ The martyr suffers, whether it be Antigone or Maggie Tulliver, because she chooses to act without recourse to the community or the generations “to which [she is] nevertheless tied by the strongest fibres of [her] heart” (284). Her decision is exceptional in the sense that Kierkegaard intended, in that Eliot presents it as extrasocial—perhaps even presocial. For this reason the exceptional decision carries with it the risk of censure, even if, as Eliot points out, “heresy properly means choice” (284). As the etymology Eliot alludes to here suggests, it is only historically and discursively—that is, contextually and conventionally—that the unmediated choice becomes anything other than valid.

What comes into view in The Mill on the Floss is Eliot's exploration of modes of agency other than those based in sympathy and reciprocal understanding, and her championing of forms of decision-making commensurate with Kierkegaard's concept of the exception. Given the power of the critical trends that have so influenced our understanding of Eliot's works, it is unsurprising that Eliot's preoccupation with alterity has gone largely unnoticed. However, in his exploration of radical otherness, Others, J. Hillis Miller goes far in revising our (and his own) understanding of what we might call the exceptional agencies of Eliot's fiction. In his discussion of Middlemarch (1871), Miller describes the transformative judgment Dorothea makes during her night of crisis to go to Rosamond as a “preperformative, a deposing positing.”Footnote ²⁹ Miller argues that the impetus for decision-making here derives from a resource other than the social or discursive world: as an “inaugural positing,” this type of exceptional choice “is always blind” and thus “escapes or obscures cognition” (79). Dorothea's decision is exceptional in that it finds legitimacy only in itself, not in discussion and deliberation. Eliot presents Maggie's decision in the same way. Decisions such as these are not arbitrary but rather what Eliot's contemporary Søren Kierkegaard called a “baptism of the will” (Either/Or 75). This is the “the movement,” as Kierkegaard argues in Fear and Trembling, that “requires passion … every movement of infinity is carried out through passion, and no reflection can produce … the continual leap in existence that explains the movement, whereas mediation is a chimera.”Footnote ³⁰ This passionate movement, which eschews reflection and mediation, is nonetheless, according to Kierkegaard, “carried out normatively” (Fear and Trembling 42). Such decisions are required at the moment of crisis, “when the opposition between the norm and its realization reaches its greatest intensity” (Agamben 36). This intensity demands the exceptional decision or what Kierkegaard termed the “leap in existence.” This type of unreflective, unmediated leap in existence describes a crucially important and recurrent form of agency in Eliot, which, perhaps, has its primary model in those “elemental tendencies” from which Dorothea's analog, Antigone, derived her decisive strength.

I want to turn now to Kierkegaard, who was roughly Eliot's contemporary and who had a great influence on Carl Schmitt, to emphasize the link in Schmitt—and ultimately in Eliot—between the sovereign decision and providence. For Kierkegaard, the authentic decision, the either/or, is not political in any essential sense but rather a theory of ethical agency in which the fundamental choice is between the aesthetic life and the ethical life. The practices of deliberation and detachment that for Kierkegaard mark modern thinking also produce the skepticism and irony that the Dane, like Schmitt, associated with the German Romantic tradition—and particularly with Friedrich Schlegel—and for which (and for whom) both showed unmitigated disdain. Romantic self-understanding, according to Kierkegaard, is founded in an ironic worldview that “requires difference to validate itself and [thus] can never be absolute.” By contrast, the ethical choice, which “posits the absolute,” “has been made with all the inwardness of personality” (Either/Or 79). The truly ethical decision for Kierkegaard refers only to itself, because the absolutely ethical is beyond comparison; it is incomparable. In this case, the chooser's “inner being is purified and he is himself brought into an immediate relationship with the eternal power that omnipresently pervades all existence. The person who chooses only esthetically never reaches this transfiguration, this higher dedication” (Either/Or 75). In this way the choice that is ethical can also be understood as providential—indeed, for Kierkegaard it cannot be understood otherwise. Moreover, what makes the decision ethical for Kierkegaard is “not the reality of that which is chosen but the reality of choosing.” Crucially, then, the “ethical constitutes the choice” in precisely the same way for Kierkegaard that the decision constitutes the political for Schmitt: the authentic decision sees its justification only in the fact of its being and is in this way comparable to a metaphysical event (75).

The link between Kierkegaard and Schmitt is clear, but the former's thinking on ethical agency also illuminates the cruxes of Eliot's novels, in which the exceptional choice is often the definitive mark of the novelistic hero or heroine. And perhaps the intellectual connection between Eliot and Kierkegaard is not surprising given that both are indebted to Feuerbach and the belief that theological value inheres not in Christ but in human experience itself. It was due to her faith in the depth and value of human personality—as well as humanity's complexity and propensity for failure—that Eliot did not entirely abandon religion in the face of a deeply felt skepticism and even disdain for formalized religion. For while Kierkegaard's commitment to Christianity certainly exceeds any sentiment evinced in Eliot, his sense of the providential force of human personality is particularly important, I believe, for understanding providential intervention in The Mill on the Floss (as well as, had I the space, the forms of agency presented in her later novels).

The conclusion of The Mill on the Floss crystalizes what I call the dialectic of form in Eliot's novels. Here, Eliot's realism is confronted by the mythology of the flood as an “awful visitation of God” (Mill 538). The flood destroys Maggie, but she nonetheless redeems herself through her committed action, which transforms “passionate error into a new force of unselfish human love” (533). The debt to Antigone in the novel is clear: although the ethos of philistinism that functions as a “higher authority” for St. Ogg's is hardly sacred, it nonetheless appears as rigid as the laws of Thebes; regarding Maggie, “that authority had furnished [the town with] a very explicit answer” (526), which forces even the kindly rector Dr. Kenn to finally succumb and “advise Maggie to go away from St. Ogg's” (533). In her subsequent decision to sacrifice herself to save (and in a sense to redeem) her brother, Tom, Maggie—like her progenitor Antigone—embraces “the impulse of sisterly piety” and in so doing ultimately redeems herself (Antigone 364). Eliot creates an essential identity between Maggie and the providential flood; at precisely the moment she joins “the current of the river,” her reflective sense of self dissolves entirely: “Maggie felt nothing, thought of nothing, but that she passed suddenly away from the life which she had been dreading: it was the transition of death, without its agony—and she was alone in the darkness with God.” This suspension of reflective thought is accompanied by a reflexive awareness of a God who, for the Feuerbachian Eliot, could only be the projection of Maggie's own, human divinity. The moment of intensity passes but leaves Maggie in a new state of resolution under the influence of which “she was hardly conscious of any bodily sensations—except a sensation of strength, inspired by mighty emotions … and the strong resurgent love towards her brother” (Mill 539).

In the moment of intensity, there is a dissociation that results in Maggie's sudden recognition of a hidden depth of personality—what J. Hillis Miller has called that “other self within the self,” which Miller argues “is the basis of ethical decision” in Eliot.Footnote ³¹ The decision in this case is exceptional because it finds its impetus in itself, and providential because it materializes, so to speak, as if from a higher power. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard describes this providential movement in terms of romance: “the knight will have the power to concentrate the conclusion of all his thinking into one act of consciousness”; “His love for that princess would become for him the expression of an eternal love”; “having totally absorbed his love and immersed himself in it, he does not lack the courage to attempt to risk everything” (42–43). The individual decision based in unselfish love and commitment, one that incurs great sacrifice and the real possibility of death for the chooser, is a fundamental criterion determining the political for Schmitt. The eternal and unreflective commitment of the hero faced with his own destruction is of course also a central generic criterion of romance, a form that incorporates themes of committed sacrifice and redemption so familiar from Christian mythology. Maggie's “leap in existence” provides her with the apparently supernatural strength to reach Tom amidst the chaos of the flood—a feat in Eliot's novel that itself seems miraculous. Maggie meets Tom's “deep astonishment” at her sudden appearance with an assurance that “Yes, Tom, God has taken care of me, to bring me to you” (Mill 541). Tom intuits the apparent truth of Maggie's statement: “It came to him with an overpowering force,” and “he guessed a story of almost miraculous divinely protected effort” in his sister's quest to rescue him. In a striking reversal of convention, at the final moment of The Mill on the Floss, Maggie becomes a version of Kierkegaard's knight.

Yet Eliot, we know, does not share Kierkegaard's religious faith. Maggie's effort presents itself to Tom “almost” or as if it were “miraculous” and “divinely protected.” In the same way, the flood in the novel appears providential, takes the form of providence, but is in fact only a natural event, however sublime in its magnitude. This flood is in fact no different from the one to which the “old men” refer as they “shook their heads and talked of sixty years ago, when the same sort of weather brought the great floods … and reduced the town to misery” (531). This is not the “awful visitation from God which her father used to talk of—which had made the nightmare of [Maggie's] childish dreams” (538). Nonetheless this flood, Eliot assures us, is like the biblical flood. Similarly, Maggie's sacrifice is like Christ's. The novel cannot escape the determining force of Christian mythology, nor does Eliot wish it to: the presence of myths of redemption and transcendence provides the antithesis of Eliot's narrative of diremption and loss. In other words, Eliot's novel declares its finality, its resolution, in events characterized simultaneously by both diremption and redemption. This dramatic and aporetical movement formally reproduces the operation of the exception as the radical overcoming of a state of crisis through the revelatory event. What we find, then, at the end of The Mill on the Floss is Eliot's recognition, expressed in generic terms, of secular modernity's disavowed need for religious thinking as a means of formalizing the dissonance of contradiction and aporia. By compounding generic registers, the novel makes explicit the temporizing power (what Habermas referred to as the “sustaining power”) of providential authority, which Hadley's “liberal cognition” and Anderson's powers of “detachment” tend to overlook or disavow, and which exposes the way that merely human justice relies on decisions that take exceptional or providential forms.

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While Adam Bede is the most explicit and sustained example in Eliot of the providential function of the decision in the legal realm, there is no intervention in Eliot more expressly providential than the author's own decision in The Mill on the Floss to conclude the novel with the excessively symbolic flood that washes away Maggie Tulliver, and with her the moral impasse that stands in the way of the novel's more controlled resolution. And if Eliot's “aesthetic rehearsal” of Christian myth in The Mill on the Floss must, as Jameson would argue, “mean something else,” what, then, does it mean?Footnote ³² In other words, why does Eliot's early work repeatedly seek recourse to the providential authority of the exception? Hayden White has suggested that “narrative in general has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority.”Footnote ³³ And “where there is ambiguity or ambivalence regarding the status of the legal system, the ground on which any closure of a story one might wish to tell about a past, whether it be a public or private past, is lacking” (15). Schmitt's theory of the exception (and Agamben's reading of Schmitt) provides an appropriate idiom with which to explain the formal responses of Eliot's fiction to precisely the sort of legitimacy questions, and problems of closure, that White describes. By foregrounding problems of legitimacy and authority, Eliot's emplotment of providential forms constitutes a critique of the historical narratives that underwrite and help formalize nineteenth-century self-understanding. This is most clear in The Mill on the Floss where the capacious symbolism of the flood easily accommodates the conflation of providential Christian eschatology with the progressive sense of historical unfolding that was all important to Victorian self-understanding. The incongruous conclusion of the novel reveals the irrationality inscribed within the formal rationality of nineteenth-century “liberal cognition” and progressive historiography. Thus Eliot's novels critique the progressive narratives they are so often understood to promulgate and in so doing trouble the commonly held belief that they uncritically or unknowingly naturalize the punitive events they depict, such as Hetty's transportation or Maggie's destruction in the flood. This stance derives its force precisely from the sort of progressive historiography with which Eliot's fictional narratives—and Victorian narrative more generally—are understood to harmonize, and which sees in history's immediate present the inevitability and rationality of the events that have produced that present.Footnote ³⁴

We find a similar problem of authority in Adam Bede, which exposes the “aporetical formulation” in which “what must be inscribed within the law is something that is essentially exterior to it, that is, nothing less than the suspension of the juridical order itself” (Agamben 33). The procedural apparatus breaks down precisely at the moment of the law's application, forcing a decision that forecloses this gap in authority. Eliot demonstrates in Adam Bede that realist narrative falls victim to the same problems of authority as those worlds it struggles to represent and thus requires the same type of providential interventions. Eliot's next novel, The Mill on the Floss, makes the temporizing power of providential authority explicit. In the paradoxical conclusion of the latter novel there exists the same agential gap, the same inexplicable identity that I've associated with the transfiguring power of the exception in Adam Bede.

Yet in The Mill on the Floss it is George Eliot “herself” who most clearly steps into this gap to intervene as the sovereign author-ity. Eliot harnesses the providential power with which she is vested as author in order to contend with the ethical as well as political indeterminacies of her novel and the aesthetic problems presented by these indeterminacies. In the same way, then, that we find the decision inscribed within the operations of liberal proceduralism, crises of authority in realist narrative also necessitate the metaphysical solutions made available by religiously coded generic forms like romance. However, these interventions function in a manner that is apparently incongruous with Eliot's realist aesthetic. The interruption and suspension of realist norms make apparent the exceptional measures on which novelistic and historical order depends and provide the means to understand the function of the novel in ways other than working to discipline the subject in the service of liberal norms, on one hand, or as working to prepare liberal subjectivity to settle for a potentially inadequate conception of justice as merely or purely procedural. The problems of closure and generic instability in Eliot's early novels—which have for too long been understood as the product of indecision or as mere clumsiness—in fact demonstrate the acutely precarious nature of human conceptions of justice. Eliot prepares us for this sobering fact in her examination of Antigone and the moral that she takes directly from Sophocles and then extends to a modern, supposedly secular world: “that lofty words are not becoming to mortals” (“The Antigone” 366). Indeed, if we choose not to embrace the common assumption that Eliot's novels uncritically reproduce and therefore unwittingly promote a typically liberal nineteenth-century worldview, then we find instead a vision of the world entirely commensurate with the theory of realism she famously professes in Adam Bede. Her approach to representation thus comes with a mandate to “give a faithful account of” the contradictions and indeterminacies of the modern world reflected—sometimes directly but often obliquely—by her novels (193). It is on these terms, oddly enough, that we should understand the formal significance of romantic and religious authority in her novels, which demonstrate that in a rationalized world putatively bereft of romance but rife with indecision, a providential authority is nonetheless required to fill the conceptual gap where the miracles and magic of romance once existed.