Eliot's Angels: George Eliot, René Girard, and Mimetic Desire

By Bernadette Waterman Ward

René Girard’s mimetic theory opens up ways to make sense of the tension between the progressive politics of George Eliot and the conservative moralism of her narratives.

In this innovative study, Bernadette Waterman Ward offers an original rereading of George Eliot’s work through the lens of René Girard’s theories of mimetic desire, violence, and the sacred. It is a fruitful mapping of a twentieth-century theorist onto a nineteenth-century novelist, revealing Eliot’s understanding of imitative desire, rivalry, idol-making, and sacrificial victimization as critical elements of the social mechanism. While the unresolved tensions between Eliot’s realism and her desire to believe in gradual social amelioration have often been studied, Ward is especially adept at articulating the details of such conflict in Eliot’s early novels. In particular, Ward emphasizes the clash between the ruthless mechanisms of mimetic desire and the idea of progress, or, as Eliot stated, “growing good”; Eliot’s Christian sympathy for sacrificial victims against her general rejection of Christianity; and her resort to “Nemesis” to evade the systemic injustice of the social sphere. The “angels” in the title are characters who appear to offer a humanist way forward in the absence of religious belief. They are represented, in Girardian terms, as figures who try to rise above the snares of the mimetic machine to imitate Christ’s self-sacrifice but are finally rendered ineffectual. Very few studies have tackled Eliot’s short fiction and narrative poetry. Eliot’s Angels gives the short fiction its due, and it will appeal to scholars of mimetic and literary theory, Victorianists, and students of the novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780268202637

Bernadette Waterman Ward

Bernadette Waterman Ward is associate professor of English at the University of Dallas. She is the author of World as Word: Philosophical Theology in Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Entranced by the lyricism and intensity of George Eliot’s Adam Bede the first time I read it, I found the character Dinah strangely weakened as she sought to convert Hetty, who was condemned for murder. I began to look back through the book for the meaning of this. George Eliot had been exquisitely rich in her descriptions of farm and dairy, country dance and kitchen work, carpentry shop and drawing room. Moreover, she had shown sharp, witty insight into the subtle ways people persuade themselves they are doing no harm, or neglect their duties, or miss saying the very thing or seeing the very thing that would join heart to heart. She had been so clear about dynamics in a family devastated by alcohol, so measured in her attention to detail in every least leaf, to every gesture that would enrich meaning, that I knew the lapse must be deliberate. And so it was. The narrator intruded with little flurries of explanation at key moments, as if there was something readers should fear about Dinah’s Methodism. Puzzled, I investigated early Methodism but soon realized that was not the source of the strange tension tugging at the story.

Meanwhile, my old friendship with René Girard was enlivening a sabbatical at Stanford University. As I joined his fortnightly salon, the patterns of behavior described in mimetic theory began to illuminate Eliot’s novels, and the relationships of the novels to the intellectual ferment in which they were written. I increasingly focused my presentations for the Colloquium on Violence and Religion on Eliot’s novels. Besides Girard himself, Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Gil Baillie, Paul Caringella, Randy Coleman-Riese, William Hurlbut, Mary Ann Eller, and Martin Ford were among the more helpful interlocutors.

A presentation on Daniel Deronda for the colloquium demanded attention to Eliot’s biography. The many studies of her life scarcely touched on the dissonances I had detected; mostly they joined a choir invisible, praising not only her wisdom about human relations and her skill at creating immersive settings but also her intellectual integrity, her progressive thought, her feminist boldness, and her courage in the face of convention. Her brother’s malice had been her great heartbreak; the loyal, loving hero who had awakened her talent and manifested her to the world was her longtime lover, George Henry Lewes.

Except for some of the incidents and locations described in her novels, the heroine of the biographies seemed scarcely connected to the voice of her fiction. There was a near-universal presumption in the criticism that humanism was the creed of any intelligent person and that Christianity was something that had been left behind—rather an embarrassment. This attitude was perhaps consonant with an argumentative strain in her novels, but it did not accurately reflect the conditions of their composition. These were not documents of triumph. Eliot had broken away from her cultural background with resentment and with anguish; the ambivalence pervades her novels. I first detected it in Adam Bede, but it was nowhere to be completely escaped; the colloquium alerted me to the mimetic dimensions of this cultural tension in itself. Then, in The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans, Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s attention to Eliot’s letters was revelatory. Her attention to family dynamics illuminated the novels; details about Eliot’s interaction with the Bray circle brought some of the intellectual turmoil into focus; the degree to which John Cross had controlled Eliot’s legacy amazed me.

I did not want to write a biography, and I have not done so. However, it was best to structure the book chronologically rather than thematically, in order to follow the author’s intellectual development. Only chapter 2 is thematically organized, showing how clearly Eliot noticed the patterns of behavior systematized by René Girard’s mimetic theory. Eliot’s fiction makes use of more biographical material than is conventionally invoked to discuss it. I was inspired by the groundbreaking work of Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Felicia Bonaparte, and Fionnuala Dillane. Reading the letters, fiction, journalism, and translation in temporal relation to one another revealed unexpected gaps in the treatment of her works. For instance, many critics follow John Cross in their intense focus on Eliot’s estrangement from her brother Isaac. His relations with her were, the letters show, far less harsh than biographers had implied; relations with her sisters, usually neglected by biographers, also strongly affect her work. Her journalism seems the work of a brash, self-confident partisan, almost at times a propagandist, easy to relate to the progressive and feminist icon. Yet her novels also endorse conservative stability with warmth and humanity. To add to the confusion, both Lewes and Cross described the novelist as emotionally sensitive, shrinking, even dependent and tentative. Sadness, self-consciousness, and resignation are deeply imbued in the letters. Something far more complicated than the inevitable progress of sensible, broad-minded humanism was going on there, and it deeply colored the novels.

Eliot’s translation work revealed a great deal. Most critics treat Eliot’s study of Baruch Spinoza, David Strauss, and Ludwig Feuerbach as her awakening to real scholarship among great minds. Spinoza alone seems to support that description. Eliot had rebelled against the conventional Anglicanism and the bigoted strain of Evangelicalism that she identified as Christianity. What she took away from Strauss and Feuerbach was less devotion to truth than examples of using scholarly apparatus in the service of an opposing ideology. Eliot was too keen and intellectually disciplined to fail to detect the dishonesty. She had been appalled by sincere but frightened biblical literalists; confronted with uncomfortable challenges, they had disgusted her by their intellectually flaccid, even cowardly attempts to save the appearances. Strauss and Feuerbach, and other progressive thinkers, were bolder. From them she expected scientific truth, but she found rather less sincere, though more competent, advocacy work. By the time she was translating their texts, she was already committed in various ways to the progressive movement around her. There was no place to go back to. Sensitive, idealistic, and rigorous in her moral perceptions, she bitterly experienced how scapegoating, exploitation, and cowardice reigned in Utopia also.

Important critics like George Levine and Gillian Beer, Barbara Hardy and F. R. Leavis, certainly take into account the thinkers that Eliot read, especially the ones she returns to repeatedly, such as Comte and Feuerbach. (Avrom Fleisschman has made a case for adding John Stuart Mill to her personal pantheon, but in the letters the support for Mill’s importance is weak.) Nevertheless, over and over, it seemed that some essential aspect of her attraction to these thinkers was passed over. Critics treated Eliot as if she pointedly chose her humanism and was pursuing it as a goal. What struck me in her novels was how little characters or plot seemed goal-oriented, focused on what was to be done. The stories primarily evoked sympathy, as readers found themselves thrown into lives thick with circumstance. The question seemed to be, rather, How did this character end up in this place, as this sort of person? Despite her solid and even stern moralism, Eliot’s fiction was not, as it were, so much about intention as about accident: efficient rather than final cause, to be Aristotelian. Her lush realism and piercing exploration of emotional mechanisms had, in the end, a weight of passivity, as if from a character far more like the dependent woman described by Cross and Lewes than the bold, self-possessed innovator that later critics described.

Could it be the case that such a searching intellect, in one who had moved so far outside convention, was indeed so dependent on some man’s aid and protection? Yet more uncomfortable was the impression, after much research, that the service Lewes rendered to her seemed rather less selfless than critics’ encomia indicated. He acted with her consent, often her grateful consent; but he did actively cut her off from her family, limit and channel her friendships, control her mail, and direct her professional life—not only financially, but even as to what topics and manuscripts she should work on. However encouraging and devoted he unquestionably was, it was also clear that his interests were not forgotten for the sake of hers.

Yet without a doubt, George Eliot always defended the integrity of her art. There she confronted issues that she did not venture to face in other venues. Her ability to imaginatively inhabit her characters exceeds that of any other nineteenth-century novelist in English. In her letters, she supported a determinism that she had been convinced to consider scientific, yet she impressed on readers the moral responsibility of individual characters even as circumstances entangled them. Firmly holding that a belief in absolute morality or metaphysical truth results in the demon-worship of persecution, she yet imagines and portrays passionate devotion to justice and abstract truth, even to God.¹ Her noblest creations often act from some foundational faith—one that she thoroughly inhabits, although she insists that she does not share it. Moreover, as she wrestles with her theoretical commitments, she also confronts her own compromises and disappointments, transposed into other keys. Unexpected characters and situations comment, with deliberate disguise, on the circumstances of her own crises. Her last collection of essays, although rarely read, ties together her novelistic powers with her experiential knowledge of imitation, prestige, competition, and scapegoating—with analysis revelatory about her thought and works.

The figure that I call the Mimetic Angel forms the nexus of these tensions among life experience, progressive ideology, and imaginative participation. The Angel is virtuous but self-defeating. She comes into being according to a recognizable pattern of thwarted imitation and competition. Despite Eliot’s earnest attempts to form a fully secular role model, the Angel loses rhetorical force when unseated from her religious foundations; other, more somber figures take center stage and enact the evils of mimesis.

Eliot’s work calls readers to confront, in their private lives and in their larger commitments, the tensions arising from envy and compromise—but also what she sees as the dangerously infinite yearning for joy. Her enduring insights diffusely and richly exemplify the patterns of human relationships that have been described in more systematic form by the mimetic theory of René Girard. Girard observes, The great writers apprehend intuitively and concretely, through the medium of their art, the system in which they were first imprisoned together with their contemporaries. Literary interpretation . . . should formalize implicit or already half-explicit systems.² Eliot’s fiction, despite her sectarian or partisan commitments, ended indeed by giving a picture of life that endures. Mimetic theory can illuminate how she does so.

CHAPTER 2

Mimesis and George Eliot’s Fiction

People imitate each other. Imitation is, fundamentally, a good thing. It is a transfer of meaning, the basis of all human relationship. Yet within mimesis lurks the peril of violence. Mimesis can manifest itself in surprising psychological and social ways; it saturates our politics, our religion, our economics, our sexuality, our ethics, and the innumerable means we use to influence one another. René Girard first began to understand the implications of mimesis when dealing with novels. Some specific aspects of his analysis have already been applied to the works of George Eliot in terms of triangular rivalry among characters, but a broader understanding of mimetic analysis can more fully illuminate the novels—and their relevance to the lives of readers.¹ Eliot has long mystified critics like Virginia Woolf by marrying morally impressive heroines to second-rate men; mimetic theory can uncover a rationale for this.² Without compromising the views that Eliot actually expressed about feminism, mimetic analysis explains how submission becomes a weapon in her novels.³ Girard rejoiced in being anticipated by Eliot;⁴ he claimed to be only systematizing what had long been observed by poets and prophets, ambassadors and advertisers, moralists and Machiavellians. Stories allow readers to critique the illusions that hold us captive and to enter sympathetically the world of others who are trapped in destructive imitation—sometimes as victims, sometimes as persecutors. George Eliot wrote in part because she held that the storytelling imagination liberates her readers from many temptations to hurt themselves and one another.

Like Girard, I unashamedly situate the writing of novels within the life and especially the intellectual history of the novelist; though I often disagree with Frederick Karl, I appreciate his insight that all the novels, even after The Mill on the Floss,⁵ process Eliot’s own life crises. As in her fiction she exposes the injustice and hopelessness of mimetic mechanisms and seeks to envision avenues of escape, George Eliot inevitably confronts tensions with her own social world and disquietude over her own life’s trajectory. Girard calls novelists the true specialists in human relations, and indeed Eliot’s insights reward readers’ attention.⁶ She has both a private and a public agenda; people write novels to say things to other people, and Eliot’s agile intellect allows her to address more than one audience at a time.

One of the principles of this study is that those who investigate mimesis cannot be free of it. This aphorism applies to Girard himself, of course, as he acknowledged in print,⁷ but also to Eliot, psychologically astute as she was. Even among people who see through the illusions of destructive mimesis, mimetic mechanisms generate fears. People resist understanding and revealing the distorted feelings and actions that spring from it. The vicious aspects of the system thrive on concealment. George Eliot well understands how mimetic mechanisms can be used protectively. Her novels constitute a noble endeavor, both because they reveal the patterns of destructive mimesis and because, as an artist, she resisted her own urgent motivations to protect herself socially and emotionally. She sometimes succumbed to such temptations in her life decisions; but she approached her art honestly rather than defensively. The writing of novels is as embedded in mimesis as their structure is. Novels at best are part of a common human endeavor in which readers and writers share. Mimetic analysis serves this communion in meaning.

There are two broad categories of mimetic analysis. One is primarily sociopolitical; the other is psychological and interpersonal. When Eliot’s novels touch on politics, crowd behavior, and social structures, her observations have much in common with social observation in all eras.⁸ This work naturally explores the novels’ insights about broad societal structures that develop from mimetic desire, insights of the sort that Girard later categorized. But it is for her moral insight into individual lives and her examination of character that George Eliot won her fame. Mimetic analysis is peculiarly helpful in uncovering the more complex psychological involutions of her characters, especially the development of the Mimetic Angel, a central figure in George Eliot’s fiction.

This character usually stands at the center of Eliot’s novels; she is most often a woman, who lives under some sort of oppression but demonstrates a compelling moral grandeur. She powerfully elevates the moral lives of those around her. Yet by the end of each novel, Eliot has curbed the Angel’s influence. Eliot has puzzled generations of readers by deliberately imposing mediocrity upon the Angel in her conclusions. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar call Eliot’s repeated figure the Angel of Death. They say she can attain angelic submission only after considerable inward struggle against resentment and anger.⁹ Their Angel is a figure of feminine self-hatred, indulging in deflection of anger from the male she is justifiably shown to hate back against herself so that she punishes herself (Gilbert and Gubar, 198). Such resentment is not actually characteristic of Eliot’s Angel figure; Dinah Morris, for instance, is utterly placid in her ascetic benificence. Moreover, twentieth-century feminist critics disregarded a larger pattern: several of Eliot’s Angel characters are male. The Mimetic Angel is not primarily a feminist image. In creating the Angel, Eliot grapples with a more general phenomenon of human moral consciousness.

Before I focus on this figure, it is useful to present some general exposition of Girard’s system of interrelating the observations he gleaned from literature and anthropology. Since I often refer to the ideas explained in the first section of this chapter, the technical terms from Girard’s mimetic theory are italicized the first time they are described. Thus these first pages may serve as a glossary for those unfamiliar with Girard’s work. For those familiar with mimetic theory, the chapter explains my perspective on and development of Girard’s ideas, which he rarely applies to women’s fiction or to English novels.

When John desires something because Mary likes it, Girard calls the impulse mimetic desire—originally triangular desire, because it requires three elements: first, John, the disciple; second, the object he wants; and third, Mary, the model (originally called mediator) who shows John the object to like. Though mimesis has survival value, Girard rarely considers mimetic desire in relation to basic necessities of life and safety. The fundamental appetite he considers in mimetic desire is neither physical nor social; it is spiritual, having to do with the inescapable restlessness of human yearning.

In social terms, mimesis makes for human solidarity. Humans come from the womb prepared to respond to each other.¹⁰ By imitation, people learn from each other and affirm the value of each other. If you like what I like, I know it’s worth liking. And if you don’t, maybe it’s not good for me. We teach one another constantly in this way. Think of eating an unfamiliar berry. If George eats and enjoys it, but Martha tastes it and makes a horrified face, George may reasonably doubt his own reaction. And Martha may be right. George could have eaten something poisonous. Our sensitivity to others’ opinions is helpful in many ways; we need each other’s information and encouragement. Moreover, Girard, like many thinkers before him, found in the capacity for sympathy the unified basis of human freedom and love.¹¹ If we could not transfer our desires, we would not be able to understand and pursue what pleases another person. Our desires would be fixed immutably on our own perceived needs. That ability—to perceive some other’s good as well as my own—is the root of freedom. No one can choose without a field of choices. Upon freedom depends human love; the ability to desire good for another person requires that we first be able to perceive what the good is.¹² The ability to love reaches beyond sympathy among humans, of course, but Eliot’s novels are about people.

The spiritual root of our restlessness is a yearning for aesthetic joy, especially that of love. Love is a joy in itself, by participation in another’s joy. We seek joy in grand and in humble ways. Sometimes, when desire has not rooted itself in any soul-stirring beauty, it still brings the pleasure of friendship. There is a humble and common sort of joy in frivolous imitation, which is usually a fairly harmless echo effect. If you want a gold T-shirt because my interest attracted yours, I will cherish my gold T-shirt even more. Affirmed in our delight, we could merrily keep reflecting each other’s desires forever while enjoying our solidarity in our gold T-shirts. Then again, we will probably find out, eventually, that gold T-shirts are not deeply satisfying—especially if we both can get them.

Of course, if there’s only one, we’ll compete for it. Envy is the first step in conflictual mimesis. People steal because of this kind of competition, or collect possessions that fail to satisfy. Rosamond Lydgate, in Middlemarch, ruins her family financially by competitive purchasing. Meanwhile, Dr. Lydgate is slowly crushed as he realizes that his wife does not affirm his desire to imitate great scientific discoverers. With pitiful anguish, he resists articulating the disappointment as he realizes it. He knows his bitterness would escalate as his wife echoed it back. (He does, once, utter a bleak reference to Keats’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, but the reference is too oblique for Rosamond, blunting its sting.) Silas Marner involves not only theft of physical possessions, but a competition for the child Eppie as an object. Even before her physical father meets her and wants her back, Silas fears she will get fond on anybody else more than himself.

But competition for objects—even human objects—is only a first step in mimesis. Eliot exposes in book after book the disappointment of those who obtain a rival’s object and discover that the object was not the real goal of their striving. The recognition may incite a deeper form of rivalry. In destructive mimesis, people compete to be the model who sets the competitive trends. A good model simply wants to share some joy with the disciple. A disciple learns what satisfactions to desire by echoing the model’s loves. But there is another benefit for the model, who gets the pleasure of encouragement in the echo, as the disciple vindicates the model’s preferences. That way, the model knows that her vision is worth pursuing. In a good relationship, seeing the model’s success may show the disciple some means to his own flourishing too, in encouraging others to find the same joy.

Yet the desire to be a trendsetter often goes wrong. A spectrum of overt and covert violence springs from attempts to address human spiritual needs by physical or social means. Mere objects are the most common substitutes for infinite joy. In Adam Bede, Hetty gets fine earrings from Captain Donnithorne. They are not quite enough for her; she goes on to dream of silk stockings and fine gowns. She wants them because she thinks that they will make her a great lady envied by everyone. Readers know that these trappings could never satisfy her desire, even her petty hankering for social status. Still, like Hetty’s, most people’s desires rove from object to object. Finally, most people find objects unsatisfying.

Hetty’s goal in becoming a great lady, or anyone’s goal in being a trendsetter, is social affirmation. It often substitutes for spiritual and aesthetic joy, once basic needs are satisfied (and sometimes before that). Social affirmation feels like love and surpasses satisfaction in objects. The transference of desire from one object to another, and finally to mere status, is a common mistake in trying to satisfy the yearning for lasting joy. Everyone is tempted to fix upon affirmation as a main goal. But when it is unmoored from truth, affirmation has a cost. If I demand your affirmation, no matter what I fix my taste upon, I cannot learn what is good and what is not. Sometimes our taste goes wrong; we desire things that are not good for us, and nevertheless we seek encouragement. One can find online chat rooms in which even heroin addicts encourage each other. This affirmation of their desires will not actually empower the addicts to flourish. In Middlemarch, Mary Garth is quite right to refuse to encourage Fred Vincy’s desire to be an idle gentleman.

Spiritual hunger makes people desperate for affirmation in mimesis, even through the escalation of envy that Girard calls conflictual mimesis. Yet the spiritual yearning has at its root a less bleak goal. Girard calls it a hunger for being. This word has very wide application in English; because of its complex philosophical implications, I use it in his technical sense very rarely. Girard’s use of being is psychological and social rather than metaphysical; he means a psychological effect involving one’s sense of oneself as a person. It is with some misgivings that I vary my vocabulary in this respect from that of most students of Girard. The word being has depth because it refers, in a way harking back to Plato, to the ultimate spiritual end of desire. If personhood is conceived as one’s relationship to God, the word being appropriately reflects receiving the love of the Person who wants another to exist and to flourish. That is also the desire of the model in good mimesis. But to discuss corruption in the social world, where I shall mostly be dealing with it, Girard sometimes uses the term prestige,¹³ the term I use more frequently. It is accessible without evoking the metaphysical implications. Readers should bear in mind that the term is somewhat too narrow for Girard’s idea, because ordinarily prestige refers to other people’s opinion of someone. Girard’s notion of prestige includes one’s self-image, insofar as it is dependent on others’ perceptions and affirmation.

Enjoying beauty provides a fuller satisfaction than social superiority. The love for beauty is deep. Human beings are embodied, and also separated by the particularity that comes with bodies. Because each of us sees beauty differently, imitation of others’ joys can teach us about beauties previously unsuspected. Sensory pleasure is the beginning, though not the limit, of joy in beauty; George Eliot finds all aesthetics derived principally from touch of which the other senses are modifications. Those who stay at the level of mere physical satisfaction are at best like sleepy Tessa in Romola, at worst like the addicts and drunks who die in Silas Marner, Adam Bede, and Middlemarch. Eliot commends a higher order of pleasure in the combination of emotive force with sequences that are not arbitrary and individual but true and universal—in other words, pleasures that can be shared intellectually. Indeed she most seeks beauty where Girard does: in the kinds of truth one finds in comprehensible and complex social order, especially in the social and linguistic sphere. Eliot’s aesthetic theory encourages examining emotion, in its tendency to repetition, at the depth of both comedy and tragedy. The fulcrum of the pleasure in both is recognition, anagnorisis.¹⁴ Truth is a more satisfying, permanent, and difficult kind of beauty than physical delights or social supremacy. To seek the recognition of truth by means of mutual encouragement raises mimetic desire to the spiritual level. The soul yearns for beauty. No series of physical or social goods satisfies that longing. Seeking such joy, in a thorough and honest way, can lead one to desire infinite beauty and goodness. While keen for beauty, Girard discusses aesthetics little, and then mostly obliquely, in print.¹⁵ Nevertheless, his inner compass was Augustinian; Girard declared, Mimetic desire is also the desire for God.¹⁶

Without understanding the spiritual reality that is the ultimate goal of mimetic desire—at least vaguely—a person cannot long focus on the aesthetic joy. More immediate mimetic instincts often overwhelm the peculiar perceptions, insights, even mere pleasures that we could otherwise share with one another. Social doubts and obsessions drive us to goad envy instead of giving encouragement. A properly focused desire is historically called the virtue of Hope. As a virtue, Hope is not mere optimism. Rather than a feeling of confidence about whether some pleasure is attainable, Hope is an ability to keep one’s focus on the good goal, no matter what the conditions (Duns Scotus 91). Hope allows mimesis to function in its beneficial context: calling other people to beauty and encouraging others for their own physical, social, and spiritual flourishing. We shall see the ways in which a preoccupation with the virtue of Hope burns under the surface of Eliot’s fiction.

Money is a good image for Girardian prestige because, without a spiritual focus, desire is empty. Money represents nothing but a desire to get something—anything. Like desire, money can be infinitely transferred. As do many English novelists of her day, Eliot frequently uses money and the promise of money (they amount to the same thing, socially) as a shorthand for such prestige. However, her observation is wider and more subtle than that. People can direct desire with other things besides money, like rank, physical force, or personal charisma. Eliot is particularly fascinated with personal charisma.

Girard first described social charisma as a manifestation of conflictual mimesis in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. He traced the phenomenon in Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband, where Pavel is a vaniteux, someone whose desires are controlled by others. He is incapable of desiring even his own wife, unless his rival Velchaninov desires her. Once widowed, Pavel must induce Velchaninov to desire his new fiancée. The reader gradually discovers that Pavel is enslaved to imitating Velchaninov precisely because Velchaninov was so powerful a rival that he won the object of desire from Pavel: he fathered a child with Pavel’s wife. Pavel does not care about the child—whom he mistreats—but the power, the prestige. He wants to be Velchaninov; he wants the status of the successful rival. Therefore, Pavel must induce Velchaninov to affirm that they both are desiring the same thing. That way, Pavel knows that he is like his idol; he is still trying to compete. Velchaninov’s prestige is the real object of the competition. The woman, wife or fianceé, is irrelevant. In Demons (sometimes translated as The Possessed), Dostoevsky’s insight reveals an impulse yet more depraved: the disciple wishes to possess the model’s force, which takes the form of mere undirected violence, and compel others into imitation. Eliot examines complications of mimesis like these, for instance, in the character of Wybrow in Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story: Wybrow depends on Gilfil to direct his desire for Caterina. He competes against Gilfil for prestige in a totally destructive way, insinuating his controlling power into Gilfil’s simpler love for the girl. Caterina eventually responds with dagger in hand.

Like desire, violence is easily transferable. A student may resent an unfair grade and snarl at her roommate because she dares not defy her teacher. Janet suffers beatings in Eliot’s early story, Janet’s Repentance, because her husband transfers to her his rage about his increasingly hostile business environment. A less obvious risk of transferred violence hovers at the edge of much of Eliot’s later fiction and sometimes breaks out. Proud characters like Grandcourt hunger for prestige in itself and make every person a potential model or a potential disciple. Girard contemplated this malignant phenomenon in Violence and the Sacred. Ubiquitous pride awakens rivalry, envy, roving resentment, cascades of transferred violence, and cycles of increasingly destructive revenge.

More often, Eliot examines the subtler addiction of the snob, which does not focus on objects or even imitation of a particular person. Sometimes we do not even like the objects that our models desire. Instead, we take on a fad or an identity for the sake of mere affirmation. What Girard called snobbism in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel originates in a mere desire for social affirmation without any other object at all (24). Since snobs realize that objects will not give them prestige, competition itself becomes the focus. Some recognize consciously, some obliquely, that the object is irrelevant to the desire. David Faux brags that he will inherit a fortune in Brother Jacob; he does want wealth, but his lies serve to give him some of the status he was unable to obtain in the Indies. In Eliot’s Felix Holt, Harold Transome does not aspire to a parliamentary seat as a Radical for the straightforward reason of wanting to govern. He wants only parliamentary status. Therefore he is happy to encourage chaos and the abuse of alcohol among the working classes.

Human beings naturally enjoy the affirmation that comes from being the person whose desires other people take for guides. We need teachers, and teaching is enjoyable. However, the desire to be a guide can degenerate into the desire to be an idol. For superiority’s own sake and nothing else, Girardian idols seek superiority that the disciple cannot vanquish. Eliot is very alert to the desire to be an idol—or to be dominated by an idol. In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie wants to be dominated by Tom, who desires preeminence. However, as a child, he does not precisely want to be an idol; he shares pleasures like fishing with his sister in a genuine desire to do her good. Tom does not focus on humiliating Maggie until they are adolescents and she becomes inconvenient. Bertha, in The Lifted Veil, is an idol and wants to be one. Instead of seeking to encourage other people by taking an interest in their delights, she is pleased to control the desires of her disciple—and to frustrate them at the same time. Eliot also examines the desires of an aspiring idol, Gwendolen Harleth, in Daniel Deronda. Gwendolen quietly envies the power of command that society ladies can exercise. She envisions ladyship as becoming an idol—making others admire her and follow her whims but never allowing them to reach her rank. This error of striving to be an idol substitutes a social satisfaction for the spiritual satisfaction of beauty.

Becoming an idol as evil as Bertha is unusual, but none of us really escapes pride. We jockey for prestige—if not our own, then the prestige of the models who provide our affirmation. In ordinary relations between a model and a disciple, the model needs affirmation as much as the disciple needs guidance. A proud model needs the disciple to remain a disciple. The disciple in conflictual mimesis is always a defeated rival for prestige. If equality ever seems possible, the rivalry can reignite. When mimesis escalates, the model’s position is often dangerous. Even hidden rivalry poses the risk of violence. This danger is most obvious on a larger social level. If a leader loses his prestige—again, an easy process in a mimetic situation—he may find himself abruptly vilified and rejected. Eliot’s novels Romola and Felix Holt illustrate, with vivid, bloody scenes of mob violence, how a leader can become a scapegoat to focus roving rage. None of us is unaware of the danger of undirected rage. We practice elaborate courtesies; we institute rules of the road, workplace regulations, hierarchies; we guard with custom our sexual relationships, our titles of respect, our roles, our property. Still violence breaks out, from the furtive assertion of power in graffiti to the thunder of bombardment in full-blown war.

As shown in Romola, everyone feels threatened by uncontrolled envy and echoing aggression. Girard calls this situation a mimetic crisis, when distinctions of all sorts are erased. In Romola, the city of Florence becomes dangerous when traditional categories dissolve. The uncontrolled violence begins with the overthrow of the old hierarchy of the Medician aristocrats and the rise of a new hierarchy of pious followers of Savonarola; the slide into anarchy becomes inevitable when Romola’s noble godfather is executed. The collapse of distinctions opens an opportunity for imitative violence to focus on a common enemy—or a scapegoat. It is easy to transfer onto a scapegoat the resentment that comes from restless rivalry. Violence is not only as transferable as desire; violence is imitative in the same way. Like mimetic desire, mimetic violence is an adaptive behavior for groups living in a dangerous world. In a landslide, a flood, a fire, an animal attack, we respond together; the fight-or-flight instinct is properly contagious. We affirm each other in the excitement. When humans band together against common enemies, we enjoy our solidarity as much as we might enjoy wearing the same T-shirts—or more. Thus we feed one another’s violence imitatively. The focus can in fact be directed nearly anywhere, whether the victim is a real threat or merely a convenient target. A scapegoat may be completely innocent—or not; the relation to mimetic violence is the same. Eliot meditates upon this phenomenon in Middlemarch.

The human scapegoating reaction goes beyond merely animal imitation, as in pack animals’ pecking orders. Around the human action, rationalizations congeal: a myth is a story that justifies the persecution. Normally, the mob catches, by the contagion of rumor, the conviction that the victim is actually a criminal, a sinner, or the source of a curse. Girard calls this mimetic illusion naive persecution. Naive aggressors sincerely believe in the victim’s guilt. Sometimes the guilt is attributed to a moral failing. Sometimes it is ascribed to supernatural causes: sins in a past life, or the inscrutable will of a god, or some perceived defect in the victim. Sometimes it is just a physical handicap, like the lame foot of Oedipus. Silas Marner’s physical defect is enough to make him a likely scapegoat of the Lantern Yard fanatics. They confirm the senseless suspicion by casting lots; they classify him as impure, unsaved. Sometimes mere accusation suffices, in a convenient moment. In the frenzy of a bloodthirsty mob, focused on a victim whose death satisfies their aggression, Girard finds the origin of archaic religion and politics. When the sins of the community are attributed to the scapegoat, the solidarity of a single hate swallows up other resentments: the victim’s persecution apparently brings unity and peace.

Girard points out that this unity of purpose among persecutors—horrible as it may be—allows the persecutors to enjoy the benefits of solidarity. The mutual affirmation breaks the tension. The apparent peace supports persecutors in the idea that the victim was the person who caused the crisis in the first place. It is important to note that the origin of the mimetic crisis and its violent outcome have nothing to do with ideas and beliefs from reasoned premises. Scapegoating is emotional, founded on unproven rumor in a contagion of opinion. Its origin is not a systematic structure of belief but the very aimlessness of the dissatisfied crowd. The randomness of the victim is invisible to the crowd; naive persecutors do not perceive that they have succumbed to an animal instinct for imitative violence.

Often, instead of converging on a single enemy, or as a prelude to converging violence, we break into rival factions. We feud; each side imitates the other’s resentment in mimetic escalation until the accusations are unjust on both sides. The contagion of evil makes the rivals indistinguishable enemy brothers. Girard uses the term monstrous doubles to show how accusations and crimes begin to mirror one another; the hatred of one faction is reflected by identical violence in another. Romola’s plot shows how partisan resentment and unfair attacks escalate, until no moral difference distinguishes the ceremonious old aristocrats from the fanatically religious democrats or either faction from the merely brutish criminal gang of compagniacci that hates them both. In the more complex interpersonal enmity traced in The Mill on the Floss, Mr. Tulliver consciously works to make himself resemble his rival, Wakem, as much as possible.

We shall see in Felix Holt one of the ways to avert mob violence: by establishing a powerful state with a monopoly on unanswerable violence. With fixed, impartial law, the state punishes only those whose guilt can be rationally proven. Much is required for a state’s legitimacy to function: faith that reason can reveal truth, for one thing; faith that the state is too strong to oppose, for another; and, above all, the conviction that there is something about rational justice that transcends the mere power of a conspiracy of violence. Rational justice is indeed transcendent because it comes from our capacity for love: our ability to perceive another’s good. If people lose faith that the state is serving that transcendent purpose, rivalry can reemerge. In its most developed form, a rational justice system opposes the myth of naive scapegoating and presumes innocence until guilt is proven. If a clear standard of proof can be enforced by a government, anyone can avoid being a victim of scapegoating mobs. Everyone is safer. (It was in order to avoid being victims of arbitrary violence that the early Roman plebs, for instance, demanded a written code of laws.) A rational justice system is the most efficient political means to prevent mimetic crises. The acknowledged authority of a transcendent standard of justice and rationality can work against persecutors’ myths. It is essential that a rational justice system be upheld by a unified state with an institutional monopoly on violence. Toward the end of her career, Eliot reverses the functions of the state and the transcendent justice system it upholds; in Daniel Deronda and The Spanish Gypsy, she proposes national unity as a possible substitute for spiritual transcendence.

Societies without a rational justice system encounter times when a scapegoat’s death or expulsion brings a kind of horrific social benefit. Everyone’s aggressive impulses have been echoed and satisfied. Mutual affirmation in violence can feel like peace and love. Girard calls such aggression a sacrifice and considers all sacrifices to have their origins in contagious violence. Girard at first called sacrifice archaic mob violence but later critiqued its operation in wider arenas than archaic societies. A sacrifice transfers violence from the community onto a victim. The mob rationalizes its action by retelling the myth of the scapegoat’s sin. Since violence against the scapegoat brought peace to the attackers, evidently, the victim was indeed the source of the disorder. It was eliminated by eliminating him. This illusionary explanation, the myth, hides the innocence (or at least irrelevance) of the victim. In reality, similar effects could ensue from violence transferred onto someone else. Girard finds in this mechanism an explanation of many seemingly irrational sacrificial practices. In times of disorder, the safest thing to do is what worked the last time; reenactments and rituals emerge. In this way Girard explains, for instance, the fate of the unfortunate person held as the pharmakos in ancient Athens—a preselected victim for group murder if civil unrest demanded it.¹⁷

Because people are instinctually imitative, a mob in a sacrificial crisis focuses its rage and detestation as if the scapegoat were attacking them. However, once the community is restored to harmony, often the power to bring peace is also regarded as coming from the victim. Apparently powerful for evil, he also brought good. By this double transference, the victim is taken to represent a demon or a divinity, there being little to distinguish such powers in archaic religions. Archaic religion repeats this peacemaking violence by ritual violence that reenacts the founding sacrifice for the purpose of communal unanimity. Many religious rituals and taboos, but also lynchings and political persecutions, are examples of this archaic means of controlling unfocused violence.

However, there are other means of deflecting generalized aggression before it avalanches into a crisis. The three main ways are social stratification, warrior culture, and a state with a rational justice system. Social stratification produces some very stable societies. People rarely compete against those whose power or prestige they perceive to be far superior. Disciples may imitate such models, almost as idols, without hoping to replace the people they admire. With this sort of hero worship, a child may imitate his father or a teenager may imitate a favorite singer. Many such relationships are healthy. A master craftsman may so far surpass an apprentice that equality is impossible while the master lives. An admirer may seek to equal or surpass a dead rival, for instance, in literature or music. In Daniel Deronda, Mirah admires her dead mother and takes her moral values from her mother’s imagined approval or disapproval. George Eliot prevents her working-class heroes from disrupting the social order by giving them great reverence for the ancestral aristocracy; this is vital for male figures, such as Adam Bede and Felix Holt. Even when Adam actually assaults the predatory aristocrat, Arthur Donnithorne, and pummels him into unconsciousness, Adam immediately returns to serving him. Admiration of those placed above oneself, without ambition for advancing to their rank, Girard calls external mediation. Recall that mediator was another name for a model that directs desire to objects. Ordinarily an object that was desired by both parties might arouse rivalry. But an external mediator is admired for such superior prestige that the rival turns worshipper. He wants to be affirmed by echoes of the honor bestowed on the model. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, presents the phenomenon among slaves.

Many, under the influence of this prejudice, think their own masters are better than the masters of other slaves; and this, too, in some cases when the very reverse is true. . . . They seemed to think that the greatness of their masters was transferable to themselves. It was considered as being bad enough to be a slave; but to be a poor man’s slave was a disgrace indeed!¹⁸

Celebrity, fandom, and partisanship for political leaders spring from the same roots as the twisted zeal of these slaves.

Enthusiasm roused by personal charisma can, like sacrifice, be institutionalized. Patents of nobility, granted or inherited, functioned this way in England; wealth or artistic recognition by ennobled Society provided another avenue into the class of external mediators for the populace. In Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Gwendolyn Harleth—whose surname is a significant pun—compromises herself morally to enter that class by marriage when she is unable to do so by artistic accomplishment.

Despite the risk of artists prostituting their integrity for prestige, by the time George Eliot is writing novels, she strongly supports the institution of hierarchies as a means of preventing social unrest. Only morally deficient characters, such as Hetty in Adam Bede or Fred Vincy in Middlemarch, have ambitions to rise above their social rank. Eliot follows Auguste Comte in promoting the idea that envy can be contained by dividing people into classes with vast differentials of power and resources. As long as each class has enough physical comfort, he reasons, everyone will be happy. Sadly, pride and envy are not so easily eliminated.

In Eliot’s novels, people with no particular social rank, like Tito in Romola, live in competition with everyone. Since no distinction of rank—a structure outside the psyche—is in place to prevent rivalry, Girard calls this kind of envy internal mediation. It involves a mediator who is close to one’s own level of power. The nearer the equality, the more likely one is to compete for prestige and to resent being the loser. Politically, this observation has proven itself in the two centuries of the age of revolutions. Because internal mediation is so common, social equality—without the rule of rational law—has great political perils. Then again, what passes for mimetic peace is usually the enemy of justice. Unjust inequalities are necessary for the mimetic pacification technique of social stratification. Often such stratified societies enjoy the vile convenience of an underclass that, like a sacrificial victim, cannot retaliate. The usual scapegoats can be victimized whenever the ruling classes need to transfer violence away from themselves. (Race functions that way for David Faux in Brother Jacob.) Such victimization is often subtle. The alcohol-soaked electioneering of Harold Transome in Felix Holt encourages and exploits the politically self-defeating behavior of the improvident classes. On a more intimate level, the mother of Eppie in Silas Marner is a barmaid—from the servant class. Godfrey can deny her financial and personal support with none of the consequences he would suffer if he denied these things to a wife of his own class. We do not hear her history. Addicts are considered expendable because of their own sins. Willed, though not directly accomplished, by Godfrey, her death has only good consequences: it frees a miraculous child to brighten the life of Silas and to give Godfrey a moral lesson—largely about respecting class boundaries. Readers rarely notice the vicious class-based deflection of harm onto Godfrey’s first wife; she is an easy sacrificial victim.

Not all separations into social classes are harmful, especially if they are based on objective differences of ability or interest; even quite an ambitious four-star general would probably suffer no envy against the winner of the Pushcart Prize for Poetry, and vice versa. In many cultures, a tradition of assigned roles—hereditary professions and the like—can function very smoothly. Talent may be wasted and incompetence enshrined, but at least envy does not rouse ambition to enter other hereditary classes; in Adam Bede, Arthur Donnithorne admires Adam and becomes his pupil but can never descend to the rank of carpenter. Conversely, Adam has no inclination to seek an army commission. Egalitarian competition itself may spur excellence, even if the admired winner is not likely to be vanquished. Eliot distrusts these aspects of competition, so the idealistic character Daniel Deronda refuses to compete for a math scholarship. Eliot’s English novels usually envision fairly harmonious cooperation between the laboring classes, who know and love their own work, and their betters. Mrs. Poyser is properly proud of her immaculate dairy. A generally virtuous person, she feels trepidation even when she justly (and tartly) rebukes Squire Donnithorne for neglecting his responsibilities as landlord. No trouble ensues. Trouble rarely strikes in Eliot’s novels because of structural inequality. More often, members of some well-defined social class fail in their own responsibilities.

The second mechanism for avoiding chaos, war, channels violence from the community toward external enemies against whom they must unite. Rivalry is submerged for reasons of survival. If the leaders can designate some out-group as ritually or racially impure, then the resentments within the society can be transferred into war, persecution, or genocide. Eliot endorses this channeling of violence in The Spanish Gypsy.¹⁹ If the out-group successfully resists, warrior cultures often turn in upon themselves. Needing an enemy, they may identify subgroups within themselves as impure ideologically, ethnically, or religiously. The unpopular religious community of Lantern Yard rejects and expels Silas Marner, with no evidence that he is the thief who raided their treasury. Mimesis fuels civil wars within a religious or ethnic group and factions in political groups. Irrational in their devotion to violence, such cultures take advantage of the mechanisms of imitation to direct and contain but not to prevent mimetic escalation.

A sacrificial victim, or a group targeted as impure, need not be actually guilty of any crime. However, in order for the system to function properly, the persecutors must believe the myth that the victim is guilty. Sometimes a persecutor does not believe the myth but believes that violence must simply be vented upon someone—not because of actual crime, or divine decision, but for some other reason. That skeptic is a non-naive persecutor. Savonarola’s great sin in Romola is to allow the execution of Romola’s godfather for this kind of political expediency. Such a persecutor manipulates myths to transform undirected rage into sacrificial unanimity, and thus restore the mimetic imitation of peace to the community. It is a common political tactic.

Sacrifices and other mimetic violence never bring permanent peace, but sometimes they do not bring even temporary peace. Someone can quite rationally disrupt the functioning of the sacrificial system by defending the victim and breaking the sacrificial unanimity. In Janet’s Repentance, Jerome successfully disrupts the victimization of Reverend Tryan; at least in the opinion of the evil men surrounding Janet’s husband, Dempster, this breaks up public order. In order to prevent such disruptions, successful sacrificers tend to choose victims from among those who have few resources and allies. In Middlemarch, Bulstrode is able to gain money—that is, prestige—by denying rights to a widow and an orphan. His lies to his first wife are the private equivalent of sacrificial myths. If a system depends upon myth and scapegoating to control violence, danger looms when the victims find defenders. As we see in the political plot of Romola, a break in sacrificial unanimity is dangerous. Factions, vengeance, and escalating violence arise as one party defends the victim of a political myth and another insists