The Politics of Generic Impurity

The nineteenth-century realist novel, it is said, offered its readers an instantly recognizable world that, in its social and political mechanisms, functions just as their own does.Footnote ³ Within this paradigm, the authenticity of Middlemarch as realist novel resides in the way it makes its readers know their world; its purpose as realist fiction is to make them act in a certain way in light of the (ideologically loaded) knowledge delivered. The political resources of such a rhetorical mode are clear. Embedded in the very fibre of signification in realist novels is a sleight of hand that ensures that the construction processes of its world are never explicit enough to allow doubt as to their authenticity. If we assume that Middlemarch is “pure” realism, such a view of its fundamentally politicized aesthetic can be both illuminating and persuasive. Yet the “scandal” of Middlemarch lies also in its impurity, the way in which its processes of telling reflect on themselves as much as on the real the novel might be said to represent. An impurely realist Middlemarch allows the reader to ponder the nature of the real the novel seems to deliver. The “inevitability” of details the logic of whose inclusion is opaque is an enabling device, productive of an essentially critical mode of reading that provokes aesthetic pleasure – making things fit – and also a political process of evaluation, one that questions the grounds on which we determine that things fit. One of the reasons details such as Letty's passion for “the delicious tale of Rumpelstiltskin” matter is their attenuated yet potentially disruptive relationship to the “predictive” nature of narrative structure, as Barthes defined it, its ability to say what will happen if certain actions and choices are made (142).Footnote ⁴ If the predictive nature of a text is disrupted then so is its ideology, in that consequences become caught up in a randomized process that may or may not reproduce the status quo and the power relations it embodies.Footnote ⁵

At crucial points the realist illusion of Middlemarch is punctuated by significant interventions of other discourses together with their conflicting understanding of necessity and telos, suggesting that the novel is hybrid rather than homogenous. Middlemarch, with its eight books and some 800 pages (for modern readers without the breathing space provided by publication in parts), seems to invite interpretive strategies that have a tendency to reduce the multitude of details that constitute the novel to a monolithic structure that displaces the details it relies on in order to signify. For many readers, while the thick description that characterizes realist novels seems to offer ideological abundance, such novels surreptitiously, even mendaciously, impose the order of the status quo. Yet it is necessary to establish a substantial degree of generic stability in order to argue that certain ideological effects are both inevitably and reliably produced in Middlemarch as an instance – perhaps the defining instance – of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Seemingly “rogue” details, ones that are not easy to co-opt into particular ends, consequently meet the usual fate of the outlaw.Footnote ⁶

To maintain the inevitable presence of certain ideological effects it is necessary to invent mechanisms to control individual reader responses (or assume they exist) and find ways to devalue the numerous items of narrative minutiae that signal not only “heterogeneous genesis,” as Michèle Le Dœuff calls it, but heterogeneous textuality (170). As monolith, the realist novel can be arraigned against itself as an instance of “tyrannical discourse,” reducing it to a generic paradigm so complete that, as an extreme consequence, there is no longer any need to read the actual individual novels that gave birth to the critique – as if Frankenstein kills, rather than abandons his creature (Le Dœuff 2).Footnote ⁷ If the proper effect of realism relies on persuading readers that there is one way, the right way, to respond to it, Middlemarch is improperly situated in terms of genre in that it contains a number of different ways of reading itself, most significantly embodied in Letty's “favourite red volume” and the tale of the miller's daughter and Rumpelstiltskin.

Scenes of reading of all kinds appear in Middlemarch as markers of understanding, of possibility, and of catastrophic misconstruction and delusion: reading of letters, Will's reading of “a tiny bit of folded paper in a saucer,” of plans, of wills, of Greek (as a form of courtship), of Casaubon's reading in the Library of the Vatican during his honeymoon (Dorothea's artless reporting of which almost causes Will to lose his composure in their fraught encounter in Rome) (192; bk. 2, ch. 21). Letty – a child – is Middlemarch’s most impassioned reader, and her reading is the most politically significant in terms of what it has the capacity to allow rather than thwart: through Letty reading is presented as a powerful species of choice. It is, significantly, socially privileged males who run foul of reading in the novel. Casaubon's scholarly reading, and his subsequent transformation of it into the moribund Key to All Mythologies, shows reading as destructive of his capacity to act meaningfully. What is significant about all acts of reading in Middlemarch is their capacity to lead to modes of behaviour that can, often literally, kill or cure. The political value of reading is both reinforced and parodied in Mr Brooke's love of documents – the residue of his intellectual endeavours – his oft-repeated assertion that he has gone into things at one point before being forced to pull up when he is (invariably) taken over and disabled by the saving grace, as he sees it, of his ability to know that it “will not do” (16, 18; bk. 1, ch. 2). The reading as misreading of a member of the landed gentry, his misrecognition of its value, makes a central point in Middlemarch – and one that does not reinforce existing political realities. Mr Brooke is swallowed whole (after his effigy, or sign, is seasoned with eggs) by a political system he is incapable of reading.

The Defeat of the Master Narrative

As folktale, “Rumpelstiltskin” exemplifies a pattern of different, non-realist ways of reading Middlemarch that are embedded in the fabric of the narrative. There are other examples. The novel wants to give us, so the Prelude says, “tangled circumstance” and “blundering lives” (3) in a vision of thwarted individuals, entrapped by the limiting possibilities policed by an anonymous collective, “insignificant people with our daily words and acts” (Finale 785). A tragic structure, one of defeat, underpins this realist representation of the social determinants that produce the modern subject. But the plot depends on melodramatic escapes (Casaubon's death at precisely the moment that will set Dorothea free) and the crude yet effective criminality of sensation fiction (Bulstrode's fraud and murderous hypocrisy). Dorothea Brooke is also, metaphorically, a “Dodo,” her sister's nickname for her, an extinct species, an imperfectly replicated sixteenth-century St Theresa on the pilgrim's progress some of the characters’ names suggest: the wilful Will Ladislaw, the hemmed-in Tertius Lyd[lid]-gate, the perfect, fatal beauty of the rose of the world, Rosamond Vincy.Footnote ⁸

Neither the scientific narrative of survival of the fittest accompanied by the inevitable disappearance of the hapless Dodo, nor the God-given guarantee of the value of the pilgrimage of even a “St. Theresa, foundress of nothing,” suggest a secular realism in Middlemarch that relies on a single, stable, master narrative (Prelude 4). A pervasively religious sense of vocation that can be derailed by wayward, worldly desires is as characteristic of the prose of Middlemarch as scientific metaphor, thus two explanatory mechanisms – the scientific and the religious – are set in conflict. The novel tests rather than asserts structural possibilities. A “child-pilgrimage” is alluded to in the Prelude as structural pattern for “the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self,” the attribute that above all else defines George Eliot's heroines and heroes (Prelude 3). Rosamond's beauty as snare gives that strand of the novel the force of a modern, secular morality tale, as Lydgate's capacity for a particular kind of socially valuable work is destroyed. Moving between narrative structures – melodrama, sensation, morality tale – makes the “predictive” nature of Middlemarch problematic. To predict is both to submit to and assert control via an agreed mechanism, a pre-determined pattern; it requires compliant rather than resistant readers to assent to the outcome by accepting the structural authority that determines it. Middlemarch refuses the stability of structures that produces the capacity to predict. The familiar, said to denote realism and determine its politics, is persistently undermined. Generic instability is a source of the novel's power to provoke and illuminate. It is part of what Fredric Jameson calls the “energy sources” (“ballads and broadsheets, newspaper sketches, memoirs, diaries and letters, the Renaissance tale, and even popular forms like the play or the folk- or fairy-tale”) that contributed to the formation of the novel as genre (7–8). Such energy remains definitive in Middlemarch, unresolved into solidity or unity.Footnote ⁹

A tension between what is structurally necessary and what is “scandalous,” is produced in Middlemarch by a dialogic relation in which matters that are substantive to the moral, social vision of the novel, its explicitly avowed concerns, are punctuated by possibilities that are small in duration, in narrative space, yet made much larger by a process of not quite covert association with what the narrator says matters. “Rumpelstiltskin” exemplifies the narrative power of such possibilities. A form of political intervention that is determined by literary modes of representation shapes the heterogeneous realism of Middlemarch, from the level of disrupted and incomplete master narrative to the finest details controlling the metaphoric fabric of the writing. What defeats master narrative is polygenesis, an essential plurality of origin that the formal processes of realism enact. Narrative form, like thought, “always begins elsewhere” (Le Dœuff 170). Polygenesis in generic terms is similar to the repudiation of “the blinding mode of the master-disciple relationship,” invoked by Michèle Le Dœuff: “there can be a master only when there is a single master. . . we might say in a pastiche of Leibniz; once there is a plurality within the origin, the other's mastery fades away” (170).

The Formal Subversion of Determinism: Gothic Realism

The presence of “Rumpelstiltskin” in Middlemarch reinforces Gothic modes less obviously present elsewhere in the novel, hence signalling a richness of generic identity. The conviction that something else is going on underneath the overt positioning by the narrator and alongside the density of thick description, iron-bound causality, the socially-embedded conversational exchanges of realism, has marked some of the most provocative analysis of George Eliot's fiction, beginning with Carol Christ's observation: “People die conveniently in George Eliot's novels” (130). Christ here means the people who seek to thwart or harm others and who frequently live on inconveniently to die peacefully in bed at an advanced age. Christ was the first to define George Eliot's practice as a novelist as divided against itself as she examines the way in which providential death, a species of fortuitous accident, is at odds with the “fictional principles” George Eliot saw herself (Christ argues) standing for (140). Christ does not articulate the conflict between fortuitous accident and fictional principles as a matter of the difference between plot and narrator (that is, the difference between what happens and the significance accorded events in the narration). Rather, her argument unfolds as an interrogation of the novelist George Eliot as she defines herself as “tragic historian,” and her propensity to allow putatively “indifferent providence” to “rescue her most favored characters” (140). Such rescue constitutes a form of “magical fulfillment” of her characters’ darkest desires and emotions, such as anger and murderous hatred (131). Christ's argument is foundational for my own in that it implies a conflict of genres within the novel. There is nothing less like the necessities of realism than the magical fulfillment of desire, but such fulfillment drives the resolution of the miller's daughter's dilemma in “Rumpelstiltskin,” and is the principle of folktale as precursor of the Gothic. The supernatural of George Eliot's realism, in the light of Christ's analysis of her fiction, can be seen as the plotting author: the author as God, a force beyond the human as it is imagined in the confines of the novel itself. Christ effectively destabilizes Middlemarch as realism, inserting a Gothic mechanism at the heart of it.Footnote ¹⁰

In their later elaboration of Christ's insights, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar identify the difference as one between “Marian Evans as historical author and George Eliot as fictive narrator”; the subsequent narrative process, one of “the author as the goddess Nemesis” acting for her characters, enabling the kind of transgressive outcomes to unfold that are a “contradiction between feminine renunciation countenanced by the narrator and female (even feminist) vengeance exacted by the author” (490–91). Thus a schism is identified within George Eliot's practice as author, one, Gilbert and Gubar argue, that was not necessarily recognized by Marian Evans herself. For Gilbert and Gubar, Christ's fairytale “magical fulfillment” for the characters, brought about by the author and despite the narrator, becomes a less willful, self-conscious process: a narrative version of the Freudian “return of the repressed,” functioning as indicator of subversive and disavowed authorial “hand.” In examining the kind of history presented in Middlemarch, Henry Staten begins with a similar distinction, that between an arguably conservative woman and the possibilities that inhere in the fictive worlds she creates, questioning whether conservatism in the life must necessarily be expressed in the novels (991). The drama of different values animating different levels of signification in Middlemarch produces a novel that subverts both social consensus and aesthetic unity, even as it seems to promote them. Different “voices,” a divided sense of narrative agency, and different genres within the novel make its social values – the very things realism is said to convey with transparency – less certain, and to some degree unavailable given that the mode of communication within the novel is so complex. “The discipline of limitation,” for example, is both understood as necessary and exposed as pernicious (Paglia 440). The nature of necessity itself becomes a locus of doubt.

In his recent analysis of George Eliot's fiction, Royce Mahawatte argues that it is persistently Gothic in its instabilities, its “extending mode of proliferating genres,” (198) and the way in which her heroines in particular take the reader back to “the incarcerated Gothic maiden” (101). In placing the Gothic at the centre of George Eliot's “creativity” and seeing it as an expression of “secular human ethics,” and “a means of systematising feeling and event as both a literary and a pedagogic phenomenon,” (Mahawatte 6) such analysis goes beyond maintaining realism as fundamental to Eliot's fiction, or of seeing realism as simply “quite savvy at incorporating Gothic and other non-realist elements” (Greiner 300) or invoking “quite ordinary. . . talk of especially singular characters as having dropped in on realism from some other genre or plot” (302). The Middlemarch males (Lydgate, Will Ladislaw, Fred Vincy) are also, potentially, examples of the incarcerated Gothic maiden – further indication of the revisionary engagement of the problematically realist novel with Gothic versions of the real, under the pressure of the kinds of disruptions industrialization produced in the changing nature of the idea of work and increasingly unstable class boundaries. The novel's master political trope of reform indicates an emphasis on what men and women do as opposed to what, in the broadest sense, they inherit, a way of looking at human behaviour that is endemic in the Gothic.

The Gothic propensity to create myths (exemplified in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) appears in Middlemarch as a process of domestication that drives characterization using mythic notation of a kind that suggests a degraded world. Such a world is circumscribed by the “reality principle of limitation,” as theorized by Paglia in her redefinition of realism as “the social novel” (440).Footnote ¹¹ And this world, as George Eliot herself theorizes it in the Prelude, no longer accommodates an “epic life” (the phrase, with its generic resonance combined with lived experience occurs twice in the Prelude) (3). Rosamund Vincy is described as “a sylph caught young and educated at Mrs. Lemon's,” (150; bk. 2, ch.16) “a charming stage Ariadne left behind with all her boxes full of costumes and no hope of a coach” (281; bk. 3, ch. 31). But these apparently parodic allusions also suggest openness, a narrative world where myths are not simply recycled, but changed. Rosamond, the “stage Ariadne,” for example, is in no danger of abandonment or of being controlled by male desire, which she acknowledges only to satisfy her own; her demotion from myth to the performance of it is a move into agency.

Letty Garth and the Modern [Reading] Subject in Miniature

It is inevitable in a novel so concerned with placing the struggles of a series of individuals within the context of much broader historical events – “the rising tide of nineteenth-century democracy,” as Staten puts it – that questions of what constitutes history should predominate (991). In this context Letty and her reading accrue even more significance in the light of Nancy Armstrong's conflation of modern subjectivity and modern forms of fiction. Letty Garth is an imaginary sibling of “the modern subject” as Armstrong saw him “in miniature” in Master Bunbury, “an otherwise nondescript boy,” who was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1780 and 1781 (1). The expression of rapt attention on the boy's face in the portrait was so singular – “the slightly open mouth and wide-eyed stare” – that a narrative was produced to account for it: “the anecdote has it that Reynolds told stories as he painted the boy who sat listening – spellbound – on a grassy knoll in front of a tree” (1). The anecdote “travelled with the image,” and the original reference to “an entertaining story” becomes, in different accounts, “fairy stories” and “frightening stories” (2). The boy was still because he was entranced by narration. The painting, therefore, captures the moment when behaviour is being altered not by “actual objects” but by stories; an outcome beyond the frame of the painting is suggested, yet it is not the direct subject of the representation (2). The sense of the possibilities of movement in the boy beyond the moment of the painting becomes part of what the image signifies. Armstrong extrapolates the significance of the conceit of the spellbound yet dynamic subject:

A speculative, imaginative construction is used here by Armstrong to instantiate a very concrete sense of historical possibility. Armstrong argues that the “perfect synthesis of desiring individual and self-governing citizen” achieved by Jane Austen was already being destroyed by a number of social factors “rioting of dislocated farm workers, the amassing of unemployed labourers in the industrial centres of England” that reduced the synthesis to a “fantasy”: “the fantasy of a society composed of self-governing individuals” (6).

The word “fantasy” is suggestive. In Armstrong's usage it is pejorative, indicating a delusion of individual agency. Considered generically, it offers different possibilities. “Rumpelstiltskin” is an example of the kinds of fantastic tales that pushed against the boundaries of realism from within an energized, hybrid form that created a sceptical, interrogatory literary “double” of the society around it, driven by tensions and problems of “fit,” not built on their extinction. Such a replication is more doppelgänger than double. Realism so constructed is not reliably – predictably – conservative in tendency in that it always, by virtue of its generic (mimetic) constraints, simply shows us what we already know, thus reinforcing, as a tyrannical discourse, the status quo. Additionally, a hybrid or heterogeneous realism produces visions of an agency that is not necessarily moral and not reliably socially benign. In Middlemarch a historicizing process – the imagination of new types of behaviour produced by a new type of individual – emerges from aesthetic praxis. Nancy Armstrong's radical insight that “the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same thing” (3) means that questions such as the formulation of particular subject positions can be understood through the fictive, not as separate from it, making questions of the separation of literary fantasy from historical fact less significant than their potentially radical interaction.

The consequences for the politics of the romance plot, a structure that dominates Middlemarch, are substantial. In the realist mode that the narrative voice of Middlemarch both undermines and asserts, gender relations are worked out in such even-handed detail through the commentary that the apportionment of blame is avoided. The coercion, violence, blackmail, and bullying of “Rumpelstiltskin” tell a different tale, giving rise to questions the actual narration of Middlemarch does not explicitly allow. In Middlemarch, the structural pattern of completion of the Bildungsroman allied to the romance plot results in the seamless, lawful integration of the characters as social subjects. Such integration becomes profoundly problematic when the lawful is itself corrupt, as “Rumpelstiltskin” exposes with such brutal clarity. Localized, often violent solutions based on an individual resistance that is not undermined by reflection and self-doubt are characteristic of folktale; there are clear winners and losers. The idea of the good citizen schooled in renunciation is absurd in a world where fate, accident, chance, and embodied evil abound. Violence, uncanny resourcefulness, blameworthy acts and misdeeds are precisely what folktale allows as a matter of course. In giving place to “Rumpelstiltskin” in Middlemarch, George Eliot included material most likely to disturb the composure of the narrative voice and the equanimity it – he – values above all else, certainly above violence of either language or deed. The stoicism insisted upon by the narrator, the resultant political quietism based on a moral capacity to endure, carry a conservative force that is radically challenged in the novel. That challenge is most powerfully present in instances of generic play.

For example, in Middlemarch, the literal function of the prose of the narrative commentary operates concurrently with the figurative and in effect controls it, as it does in one of the most celebrated metaphors in the novel, “this particular web,” meaning the complex, dense enmeshing of circumstance and character that determines outcome, and that defeats those who seek fulfilment by ignoring or damaging the fabric of “human lots,” “woven and interwoven” (132; bk. 2, ch. 15).Footnote ¹² The image is both figurative – a metaphor – and literal, an assertion about the way real life really works. “Web” also suggests a spider, reinforcing the narrator's representation of the context of “human lots” as both predatory and inescapable. The figurative value of the web, therefore, is controlled by the social vision the novel is producing through the narrator. “Rumpelstiltskin,” by contrast, works by a process in which the literal is subsumed within the metaphoric terrain of fantasy, one that allows unexplained incursions and magical resolutions, including the primary role of a supernatural figure, whose nature is fundamentally mysterious and who represents (both in himself, and in the miller's daughter's response to him) the kinds of possibilities that the narrator of Middlemarch refuses to allow. Such tales exploit rather than close the gap between words and things, stories and the real. The “telling” detail of Letty and her reading – an incident, a briefly reported piece of behaviour – imports a folktale figure into the real of the novel, a rhetorical device which links many of the major characters in a web of signification that runs athwart the declared thrust of Middlemarch as it is performed through the narrator's commentary. The “weaving” of the novel, therefore, is not simply directed at human lots, but it is a matter of form, an aesthetics of representation, where a realist methodology – a telling of the world that simply reproduces it – is subject to interrogation and disruption.

Pseudo-History and Experimentation

Speculation about the novel's fluid generic identity based on its internal dialogic relation with other modes leads to further and related questions of Middlemarch as historical novel. In Fairy Tale as Myth, Myth as Fairy Tale, Jack Zipes interprets “Rumpelstiltskin” as a type of myth that imagines a version of historical process in what it suggests about the ownership of spinning – the miller's daughter's occupation – and what spinning signifies in terms of social productivity (68–71). In this “historical” context, “Rumpelstiltskin” enables certain possibilities of reading. Published between December 1871 and December 1872, and set in the years just before the passage of the first Reform Bill in 1832, Middlemarch, as its generalising, symbolic title – an abstraction – indicates, is not an historical novel as such. The history in Middlemarch is fictive, a fantasy of history. As the Prelude announces, the novel addresses readers who care “to know the history of man, and how that mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time” (Prelude 3). In its relation to the real, and in terms of its rhetorical stance, Middlemarch is closer to Barthes's description of “the ancient [rather than modern] idea of verisimilitude”: “The motto implicit on the threshold of all classical discourse (subject to the ancient idea of verisimilitude) is Esto (Let there be, suppose. . .)” (147). Middlemarch, by virtue of the self-reflexivity inseparable from its narration, its dialogic structure, is always provisional and thus always at a distance from the real. The novel's avowedly serious concern with “the history of man” indicates a narrative program aware of the resources of the literary as a way of remaking what history is, and of history as a means of reimagining what the literary might be capable of. Middlemarch theorizes history as process (“man” as the product of a series of “experiments” overseen by “Time” as in the Prelude), invents it as a literary phenomenon, and becomes a formal enactment of it in terms of the type of hybrid narrative the novel itself represents.

As both literary genre and history Middlemarch is a type of experiment. It is pseudo-history if that prefix can be shorn of its pejorative connotations and allowed simply to indicate the degree of imaginative play in the lineaments of a history that is, first and foremost, literary.Footnote ¹³ George Eliot's practice is a logical extension of the Romantic assertion of, and confidence in, the extent to which the imagination reveals deeper truths beyond the faith in facts and taxonomies that energized nineteenth-century historical and scientific narratives. It also moves beyond the epic seriousness of Romantic mythic topoi – Shelley's Promethean, for example – to a more anxiety-driven sense of forces that threatened to overwhelm whatever rhetorical and discursive devices could be invented to keep them in check. In invoking “Rumpelstiltskin,” its politics and resolution, George Eliot sets the long historical perspective granted by “Time” in conflict with the dramatic encounters and abrupt terminations of folktale plot that give the reader visions of a change that is swift and definitive rather than perpetually thwarted. Violence, a narrative politics of shock, is characteristic of the folk discourse that produced “Rumpelstiltskin.”

The experimental is something that George Eliot famously claimed for her novels. She wrote in a letter in 1876, “my writing is simply a set of experiments in life,” (Haight 6: 216) a formulation which would perhaps cause Barthes to say “I told you so,” in that it asserts a seamless identification between the novels, the word, language and life.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet given that experiments require mechanisms, an apparatus that mediates between the experimenter and life, and that the mechanisms of fiction include genre, then the type of writing that lets us “see what our thoughts and emotions may be capable of. . . through the medium of art” includes a sense of the resources of both technique and form (Haight 6: 216). The insights of critics from widely different theoretical standpoints – from Carol Christ's analysis of the consequences of the energies of aggression in George Eliot's novels to Jameson's sense of technical experimentation (“laboratory experiment”) as central to the formal nature of her fiction – respond, either directly or indirectly, to George Eliot's own expression of the nature of her endeavour (Jameson 156). Eliot's letter is one such expression; the intertextual presence of “Rumpelstiltskin” in Middlemarch is an even more powerful one, given that it arises directly within the actual narrative fabric of the novel.

Letty's Little Red Book: Edgar Taylor's Revolutionary Edition of the Grimms’ Kinder-und-Hausmärchen

Letty's “little red book” has significance as narrative, as the type of stories it contains, and as artefact. As textual artefact, part of Edgar Taylor's early nineteenth-century adaptation of the Grimms’ Kinder-und-Hausmärchen, the collection indicates the complex cultural work of transmission, a process in which meaning is not so much replicated as manufactured. The extent to which Taylor changed the tales has been well documented. Taylor did not translate the tales, he adapted them, deleting anything that “smacked of obscenity, irreverence and violence” (German Popular Stories 16). The violence was extreme, as Maria Tatar attests:

Silver alludes to the fact that Louisa's excited cry on hearing the story – “O mamma, mamma, the little man stamped so hard he couldn't get his leg out again” – possibly indicates that George Eliot changes Taylor's ending, where Rumpelstiltskin must use two hands to pull his leg out of the floor, but survives the process, reverting to the “more brutal German original” in which the dwarf can get free only by tearing himself in two (213). This alternate ending is available in Taylor's 1823 volume in the form of a note: “In the original he rends himself asunder in his efforts to extricate the foot which in his rage he had struck into the ground” (240).Footnote ¹⁵

Happy endings, when they come in Taylor's adaptations – and they frequently do – are overshadowed by the prior violence. And enough of the violence of the original tales remains, where the logic of cause and effect is uncertain and disruption often accompanies resolution. George Cruickshank's frontispiece (one of his many illustrations which contributed substantially to the success of the volumes) emphasizes a hearty, communal aspect of the Grimms’ children's and household tales (German Popular Stories 45).Footnote ¹⁶ It constructs a humour and social cohesion not usually present in the stories themselves, where social communality is undermined by nightmare instances of violent discord and equally sudden, often arbitrary restitutions. Although censored of explicit reference to the eating of the body of the murdered child by an unwitting father, “The Juniper Tree” contains the beheading of the cruelly abused little brother, the propping up of the hastily repaired corpse so that his sister will not notice that he is dead, the blow that makes the re-attached head fall off, and the revenge killing (crushed by a mill-stone) of the wicked mother by the bird-spirit of the boy. The surreal “The Turnip” ends with the student trussed up in a bag, hanging from a tree until somebody might – or might not – come along to set him free. The princess in “Cat-skin” must evade her father the king and his determination to marry her because she is beautiful, and has golden hair like her dead mother. The authentic currency of action is still, in Taylor's version of the Grimms’ tales, made up of greed, cruelty, violence and perfidy as well as good luck, nice behaviour and escapes. The determining social framework – the medium characteristic of George Eliot's realism – does not exist in the original tales nor in Taylor's edited versions. Instead, individuals in isolation magically transcend generalized localities and archetypal familial structures of dominance and injustice. The impact of the stories is of a fundamentally unpredictable world. Rumpelstiltskin is defeated by chance.

The presence of Letty's favourite volume at home in the Garth's farmhouse, with one of its tales also animating a prosperous merchant's parlour, records the influence of the publication of Grimms’ tales on early nineteenth-century life. Alluding to Mary Garth's telling of “Rumpelstiltskin,” Carole Silver notes that Edgar Taylor's translation of Kinder-und-Hausmärchen appeared in 1823 (as German Popular Stories, Volume I, which contained “Rumpelstiltskin” as the last tale; Volume II appeared in 1826) thus Mary's recitation reflects that by the year 1832 the stories “had become quite popular in England (and thus accessible to the children of Middlemarch)”; the stories were also current to the publication of Middlemarch in the context of discussions of the power of the name in primitive thought (5).Footnote ¹⁷ There is, therefore, in relation to Middlemarch, a dual historical and cultural context for Grimms’ tales in general, and “Rumpelstiltskin” in particular: the period covered by the action of the novel, the years leading up to the Reform Act of 1832, and the commentary of the tales that emerged in the early 1870s when Middlemarch was written and published. It is thus a complex matrix of textual history and cultural debates into which George Eliot intervenes with a seemingly trivial detail. The significance of the tale as it was understood when Middlemarch was being written and which dominated interpretation of it until the twentieth century concerns, as Silver records, the power inherent in naming, something that mattered in primitive thought but that is also central to nineteenth-century patriarchy and the nature of the marriage contract, based on the idea of femme couvert. The revolutionary but flawed Married Woman's Property Act became law in 1870. The parliament that passed it was the one created by the enlarged electorate following the second Reform Act of 1867. There was extensive debate in the 1870s about women's rights and property in the campaign to make the Act more effective, a campaign that lasted over twenty-five years: “Is it too much to suggest,” Lee Holcombe writes, “that these Acts carried through one of the greatest expropriations and reallocations of property in English history?” (27).

Given that both tale and novel appeared at the same time that England was being agitated by desires for far-reaching changes to access to power that the first and second Reform Acts put into legislative form, the democratic function of the literary word with its excess and its rules can be seen to sustain a literary politics. Bakhtin alludes to the way in which words are populated with the speaker's “own intention, his own accent,” they are never neutral, always subject to “this seizure and transformation into private property” (293–94). The democratic aspects of a generically unstable Middlemarch allow the possibility that for George Eliot, as well as for Bakhtin as Jameson presents him, “the novel is the vehicle of polyphony or the recognition and expression of a multiplicity of social voices,” hence “modern in its democratic opening onto an ideologically multiple population” (Jameson 3). In this particular case, George Eliot is producing modernity through the incorporation of an archaic tale into the polyphony of nineteenth-century realism, a genre, in Eliot's hands, in dialogue with and against itself. The heterogeneous realist novelist is achieving more than the legislators in her recognition of democracy itself as polyphonic and multiple. The 1832 Reform Act extended the franchise to “adult men meeting property qualifications,” it was the first time that the vote was expressly restricted to men, “legally enshrining past practice” (Hamilton xxi). The second Reform Act also defined democracy as a male-only enterprise with the defeat of John Stuart Mill's amendment to substitute “person” for “man,” 196 votes to 73; in the same year (1867) the National Society for Women's Suffrage was founded (xxiii). The novelist is more radical than the woman herself, for whom the “Women Question” seemed “to overhang abysses, of which even prostitution is not the worst. . . [I] have resolved to remain silent in my sense of helplessness” (Haight 5: 58). In the context of the politics of Middlemarch Henry Staten argues that the novel “displays a more robust attitude toward political violence and more sympathy with both the cause and the political perception of the poor than the ideological critics of Eliot have noticed,” suggesting that “their violence is the humanly justified response to injustice” (996).Footnote ¹⁸ Staten's point includes both incident (the pelting of Mr Brooke) and narration.

There is a third context, one that includes the different interpretive possibilities that Sir Walter Scott and John Ruskin provide in the 1868 edition of German Popular Stories (Taylor's notes are reproduced in this edition). George Eliot may have known this edition directly, or indirectly through the popularity it attracted as a combined edition of Taylor's two original volumes of 1823 and 1826, explicitly acknowledging the work of Taylor as translator/editor. Both Scott's letter (written to Taylor in 1823) and Ruskin's introduction (written in the year of the publication of the combined edition) increased the visibility of the volume as artefact and archive (German Popular Stories 12). Ruskin's introduction praises the tales as free of the “taint” of modern fairytales, their “fine satire” moving them beyond a crude wish-fulfilment characterized by acquisitiveness and an adult-sanctioned materialism (351). Both writers see the stories as having a liberating effect on children, but Scott is particularly interesting is his assessment that the “wild fairy interest” the stories will provoke is better than “the good-boy stories” considered appropriate reading; the “wild fictions,” for Scott, cut through in a way the “moral narrations” for which he has an “utter dislike” cannot (358). What is significant for the purposes of understanding why George Eliot might have included such an explicit reference to the Grimms’ tales is the assumption shared by both Ruskin and Scott in their very different responses that the stories directly affect behaviour in a way other, more moralizing narratives cannot.

Taylor's achievement is a particularly interesting one in the context of the preoccupation with the possibility of meaningful change in Middlemarch. In Jack Zipes's estimation, Taylor added to the revolutionary potential of the tales by making them acceptable within middle-class households where the imaginative, fantastic quality of fairytale was felt, amongst “educators” and “religious groups,” to be immoral in tendency (18). He made potentially alien material acceptable, not only for adults but, more controversially, for children (31). In effect, if not perhaps in intention, Taylor made apparently unsophisticated yet ideologically challenging stories readily available to a broad readership. These tales were often promoted for their purity, as giving access to an archaic, simpler form of community life that potentially could provide a cultural glue that would unify the more fragmented and degraded social relations of industrialized society. As a by-product they were considered by some to allow children's imaginations to develop in an untrammelled yet innocent way. In Ruskin's view, as he expressed it in the introduction to the 1868 edition, the supernatural of the tales animated the “material world” for children “with inextinguishable life” (353).Footnote ¹⁹ The burden of Ruskin's Introduction is that the tales, unlike “recent child-fiction,” cannot “warp into agonies of an immature philosophy or conscience the once fearless strength of [the child's] unsullied and unhesitating virtue” (352). But questions of a process of rogue reading remained, ones that George Eliot invites by placing her reference to the reading and telling of “Rumpelstiltskin” in the context of a genre committed to piercing the “mystery. . . of the fates that happen alike to the evil and the good” (353). A differently inclined reader may read against the grain and arrive at conclusions that depend on the more anarchic aspects of the tales, ones that refuse easy reading. Taylor's version made fairy tales more respectable but it is also arguable that he made them more dangerous.

The red volume incident is given added prominence as a double for the other incident where Letty is a key participant: a lesson given by her mother, ostensibly about grammar and Cincinnatus, yet also about male dominance and the necessity to keep still – and quiet – in the face of it.

Letty's potential transition from a child who has great difficulty in being heard, to a young woman with the right to be so is poised between the scene in the kitchen, the matter of which is determined by her mother, and an equally domestic scene of social interaction, the subject of which is set by Letty's choice of reading matter. The acts of reading, then telling, are central to the role of “Rumpelstiltskin” in Middlemarch. Louisa, Rosamund's sister and her mother's darling, hears Mary Garth's recitation. Mary has the story by heart because her sister Letty never tires of communicating it. The result is that “Rumpelstiltskin” is taken up by Louisa not simply as a tale about the victory of the young woman – although this is in implicit in her comment – but about the defeat of the “little man.” The incident adds to the pattern of sisters that Middlemarch deploys, and reinforces a female line of communication.

Family life as George Eliot presents it in Middlemarch is predicated on a violence that can always present itself as something else, reflecting the disguised mechanisms of coercion that maintain social constraints and normative behaviour. This is the case with Letty's mother's actions – the comic register of the sequence masks the less sympathetic aspects of the behaviour of a character the narrator is determined we should like: “In her snowy-frilled cap she reminded one of that delightful Frenchwoman whom we have all seen marketing, basket on arm” (229; bk. 3, ch. 24). The kind of perception the narrator manufactures in the farmhouse kitchen colludes with the silencing of Letty, making it amusing, just as the later scene with the red volume on New Year's Day introduces the generic play that exposes it.

Middlemarch explores the nature of change not only through the political mechanisms the novel describes (Reform) but also through the process of reading as a child that precedes such broader social endeavours (reform). The social components of Letty's speech – the tireless communication – draw on her reading, her selection of a fantasy that enables more than she can garner from the inhibiting interaction in her mother's kitchen. The power of the tale is validated by the parallel with her sister's defeat of the miser Peter Featherstone, one of the novel's many realist versions of the Rumpelstiltskin story in which the evil dwarf Peter Featherstone is defeated by Mary, deprived of his desire, and killed by that process of denial, by Mary's refusal to let him “do as he likes” at the end (297; bk. 3, ch. 33). Her refusal to do his bidding on his deathbed, literally on the subject of his will, clearly hastens Featherstone's death and directly results in the kind of marriage that Mary wants, to the kind of man she can make Fred Vincy become. Even this detail has structural implications. Mary changes through the accidental consequences of her “human” actions the literary inheritance plot that drives so much Victorian fiction, allowing the long invisible “unlawful” son with his “high chirping voice and. . .vile accent” (318–19; bk. 4, ch. 35) to inherit, shifting wealth away from property to money-changing in the process: “But as Warren Hastings looked at gold and thought of buying Daylesford, so Joshua Rigg looked at Stone Court and thought of buying gold” (488; bk. 5, ch. 53). An outsider, Rigg, fortuitously prevails, and Fred Vincy is forced to make his own choice about livelihood, one he will have to work hard and independently to secure. Being disinherited becomes in this scenario a means of social change. The victory is achieved not through planning, the careful accretion of multiple causes, but through the sudden death of Featherstone: a murder of sorts. Thus a formal mechanism – the disruption of the inheritance plot that drives so much realist fiction – becomes a means of registering social change. The gothic mode of Featherstone's death produces a shift in the politics of the realist, romance plot governing the characters of Fred and Mary.

As tellers and receivers of the demonic story of Rumpelstiltskin in the parlour of the “cheerful house” (604; bk. 7, ch. 63) of a prosperous middle-class merchant, full of the fellow-citizens of realist fiction rather than the archetypes of folktale, Letty, her sister Mary, and Rosamund's sister, Louisa, are poised between the possibilities different genres/narrative structures allow. The possibilities that follow are not worked out through Letty, who, apart from a brief reference in the Finale to the effect that she “argues much from books” (780; bk. 8) makes no more significant appearances in the novel. The drama lies within the act of representation itself. “Rumpelstiltskin” and the red volume make generic boundaries speak, just as they allow Letty, the usually silenced child, to speak. The tale suggests, without explicitly delivering it, a brutal way of looking at the gender and familial relations in the novel: as power struggles that are inherently, not aberrantly, violent. Set out starkly, removed from the narrator's soothing complexities, crucial outcomes of Middlemarch share all the violence and brutality of folktale and mirror in part the character types and plot developments of “Rumpelstiltskin” in particular. Casaubon, a Rumpelstiltskin who spins straw into straw, is killed off not by the carefully described and diagnosed physical decay of the “affection of the heart” (271; bk. 3, ch. 30) but because the civilised processes of negotiation cannot overcome the oppression he represents. Lydgate's brain is destroyed by his wife – she becomes his basil plant, “which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains” (782; bk. 8, Finale); Peter Featherstone dies confined to the enraged passivity he had so successfully imposed on his relatives. Mary Garth's conflict with a bullying old man is a very neat example of applied folktale theory: the fantasy defeat of the oppressor moved from one genre to the other. The novel thereby plays out the schema of the folktale, and adopts its moral content and force. At its most powerful and complex the interplay between genres in Middlemarch is an imaginative collusion.

What I have endeavoured to do in this essay is relocate the dialogue that Nancy Armstrong proposed: from one taking place between two discrete genres to one that emerges from the actual process of developing a particular genre, realism. It is a challenging range of possibilities that the shadow Rumpelstiltskin narrative allows, one that imagines violent social change within the confines of a novel explicitly dedicated to the slower modes of evolutionary development. Fiction as fantasy produces possibilities that mirror and extend the political ideal of parliamentary reform and social justice. The pseudo-history is in that sense real, providing more than a literary simulacrum of the external, restrained process of evolution the novel describes at length, and that the narrator promotes as an inescapable process. The reader makes what she or he will of the written in such a way that is not controllable, just as what details a reader takes as definitive cannot be made certain and thereby reliably co-opted into any given agenda.

At the speculative level of reader engagement that realism invites, one that comes from the reader's acceptance of the imagined humanity of the characters as real, both the conflict in the kitchen and the recitation from Letty's much-loved and revolutionary “little red book” invite us to see Letty as a miniature Dorothea, and speculate on how and for what reasons her path might be different. As mediating character, one situated between the large concerns of the novel and its reimagining of those concerns through apparently small details, Letty suggests change of the type that the novel ostensibly refuses. The narrator asserts in the Finale: “there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it” (784–85, bk. 8). Letty shows that a creature, the modern subject, may choose what lies outside it, may choose the kinds of enabling fantasies that the outside world provides, not in the real, but in the “favourite red volume.” That Letty, through her own choice of exemplar together with her own process of an implicitly resistant act of reading “Rumpelstiltskin,” might learn lessons about guile, cunning, trickery, bargains kept and yet evaded, which allow victory over the power that Rumpelstiltskin and his textual doubles, Casaubon and Peter Featherstone, represent is a possibility Middlemarch allows through what Bakhtin described as the “semantic openendedness” of the novel (novel in the broadest sense as genre) built on a fluidity that, in a distinctly literary way produces “a living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)” (7). Bakhtin's words regarding the indeterminacy of the novel bring literary realism, as it is constituted through an internal dialogue of genres, back to the real in a way that is, ironically, both self-reflexive and intertextual.