Jacqueline Osherow
Mary Anne Evans at Arbury Hall
But I, who have seen Cheverel Manor, as he bequeathed it to his heirs,
rather attribute that unswerving architectural purpose of his, conceived
and carried out through long years of systematic personal exertion, to
something of the fervour of genius, as well as inflexibility of will.
—George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life
A homely girl in search of beauty,
she didn’t have to travel far;
the (by all accounts benevolent) lady
of the estate where she was born encouraged her,
gave her free reign of the library,
whose books, no doubt, would have been enough,
but where, above her head, the extraordinary
offered its exhilarating proof
that beauty’s graspable, a straightforward matter
of pairing monomania to vision.
The lucky can get by with either one
but she wasn’t lucky (the too-clever daughter
of an estate agent) unless it’s luck
to wander meadows at will, your daily walk
along an overgrown, wooded canal,
always within sight: a Gothic Revival
masterpiece that had been a Tudor manse,
its dark heavy panels turned to lace-work.
Not that she had any use for luck:
Remember? “if we had been greater, circumstance
would be been less strong against us,”
a stance at once wishful and severe,
but the very thinking that gave us her
whoever it is we decide she was.
Besides, what if circumstance is for us,
not against us? What if all
we need is one virtuoso example
even if it’s plasterwork—before our eyes—
where I, for example, always placed her . . .
a girl (biographers agree) like Maggie Tulliver
minus the beauty, a girl like me—
not that I wanted to drown in any river—
but she (not Maggie, but George/Mary Anne)
didn’t, as a matter of fact, drown,
unless one has to drown to produce a masterwork.
Is that what she’s saying? Petrified lacework
makes its appearance in the first,
providing not only something of the fervour of genius
but a pretext for self-definition—
I, she tells us, “who have seen . . .”
as if this George Eliot of hers
was born of knowing what can be made
of dark, ordinary Tudor manors:
Mary Anne’s own lacework petrified.
Why not try what worked in Arbury Hall—
on an (Emerson’s words) “serious, calm soul”
full of infinite—if inchoate—passion?
It took time, of course. First, she found religion,
renounced it, then discovered music,
then ghostwrote essays for a lover/critic
until what we might call a string of miracles
set her, at thirty-seven, writing novels
in none of which we ever find a character
in any way at all resembling her
or in all of which; George is nowhere
but Mary Anne is never very far—
there’s always some version of the misfit woman
with an endless store of misdirected passion
she must work to minimize or harness;
even Alcharisi loses her voice
and gives up a preeminent career
to marry well and be a mother.
I used to think Eliot stingy, even cruel
to her heroines, not a single girl
achieves anything like her own success;
many readers think Alcharisi monstrous,
giving up—then heartless to—her firstborn son.
But perhaps that story was Eliot’s own:
losing her voice her own great worry,
the price of her success far too high;
perhaps she regretted not having children.
For all we know she had an abortion
(she lived in Victorian England with a married man)
or maybe she couldn’t bear to subject her characters
to the self-contortion beyond all recognition
required to effect the sort of tour de force
that became her trademark. Where was Mary Anne
beneath the exquisite plasterwork of George?
Perhaps she really did have to submerge
all traces of herself; to drown
like the character with whom she’s most identified
in order to achieve what she achieved,
maybe she saw her own life as unlived
or, rather, cut off, then petrified
in masterpiece after masterpiece.
Who’d have believed her if she’d tried to write
about learning Greek and Latin, translating Strauss,
much less making the finite infinite?
No wonder she always thought she’d fail.
Hers was the sober version of the fairy tale
that Mary, in Middlemarch, had well by heart,
unencumbered by the far-fetched part
where the panicked mother gets to keep her child.
She paid dearly for the freak, remorseless grace
that spun a universe of straw to gold,
its dark, ungainly matter into lace.
