GEORGE ELIOT AND FREUD: What Do Women Want?

Kenneth Torquil MacLean

March 14, 2004

We are hearing a good bit about equality these days, and we are going to continue about it. It is good to look back and see how difficult it has been for many groups to achieve equality, and how much nonsense they had to contend with along the way.

Everybody knows that Sigmund Freud, the great Viennese psychiatrist asked, “What do women want?’ Some people say that they were his dying words: “What do women want?” Actually, some other people say that he never said those words. Does it matter? What does matter is the impact that Freud had on all of our lives. He changed the way we all think of and understand ourselves. We do not have to have gone through five-day-a-week psychoanalysis at $150 an hour to have been affected by what that man who fled from Vienna to London ahead of the Nazis thought and wrote. I think that the most important contribution from Freud to our self-understanding was the idea of the unconscious, the notion that underneath all that monologue that goes on in my head, at another level there is a different tape playing, and it may affect what I do and how I feel as much as the conscious thoughts. If you understand and accept that idea, then the human landscape takes on a very different shape.

Freud had other influential ideas about what makes us tick as people, and some of them had to do with trying to understand what happens when we are infants and children to make us the adults we become, and what makes women act like women and men act like men--to the extent that we do. When the feminist revolution came along, some of the women writing about it took Freud as the great enemy. One writer said, “Of all the factors that have served to perpetuate a male-oriented society, the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis has been the most serious.” She was probably referring to Freud’s postulating penis envy as a universal feminine trait. Such an idea would certainly suggest that women were inferior to men. That, together with his acceptance of the mores of his time in the treatment of women, seemed to justify the charge that Freud was an enemy of women’s liberation. He also said “biology is destiny.” Probably his complex thought was somewhere in between the accepted opinions of early 20^th Century in Vienna and America today.

Another person who was not seen as a real champion of the rights of women during her life time, but who showed a very clear understanding of the situation of women in her English society was the great novelist who wrote under the name of George Eliot. Her real name was Mary Ann Evans. She is called by some the most intelligent of all the English novelists. She went to good schools, for an English woman of the 19^th Century, but we must consider that she was largely self-educated, for she studied German and became proficient enough to translate three major theological works into English: Strauss’s Life of Jesus, Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, and Spinoza’s Ethics. All three of these works were considered radically skeptical by orthodox Christians. Strauss was the Biblical scholar who tried hardest to make Jesus a totally human figure; and Feuerbach took all the Christian statements about God and said that they were really descriptions of humanity.

Mary Ann (or Polly, as she was called at different times:) had come out of an Evangelical background, and one of her aunts was a Methodist minister. After accepting this religious position totally in her late teens, she came under the influence of a more rational view of religion and kept to it for the rest of her life. Most of the connections to a religious institution of her adult life were to Unitarian churches in London. The minister of the Roslyn Hill Church in Hampstead told me several years ago that she was probably buried from that church, but the records only listed the head of the family.

Mary Ann worked in London as an editor and writer for magazines, and she was very good at it, but it was not until she met George Henry Lewes in 1852 and went away to Germany with him in 1854 that she began to write novels. Her whole novel writing career took place in their years together, years in which she was very much a social outcast, because she was living with a married man, but it did not affect his acceptability in the same way at all. He was still invited to dinner in many households of literary people, and when George and Mary Ann entertained, most of the literary men of London would come, but not their wives. Mary Ann felt this ostracism keenly, for she was very sensitive to any sort of criticism, but she never wavered in her devotion to the man she had chosen. Her brother, to whom she had been very close, cut off all communication with her for the whole time she was living as Mrs. Lewes.

When she began to write novels, she published them under the name George Eliot, and for some time the secret of their authorship was kept. It was suggested that they had been written by a clergyman, and this pretense was kept up for some years. Part of the reason was that they knew that critical reviews and sales would be strongly affected by the knowledge that she was living with a man to whom she was not married.

George Lewes was a writer himself, an extremely versatile and well-informed man in 19^th Century literature and science. He wrote probably the best biography of Goethe, and he put forth a number of books that explained science at a popular but literate level. His marriage to Agnes Jarvis had produced several children, whom Lewes supported, but Agnes had been living with Thornton Leigh Hunt, son of the poet Leigh Hunt, and she had several children by him, the first of which was acknowledged by George Lewes as his own. It is questionable whether under the laws of the time, he could have gotten a divorce in these circumstances, but there is no question that he and Mary Ann lived together exactly as though they had been married as long as he was alive.

Gradually, as her novels became successful, and as the true identity of their author became known, George Eliot became famous and was acknowledged during her lifetime as England’s greatest living novelist. Lord Bryce, in a public eulogy of Tolstoy, could think of nothing more complimentary to say of him than that as a novelist he was second only to George Eliot.

And also gradually she gained some social acceptance, and the Leweses did for some years have a Sunday open house to which many literary people came, but it was still slow going, and she was the object of great public censure, much more than her husband. Part of this was because in her novels she was very much the moral teacher. She rejected the orthodox and Evangelical approach to religion for herself, but she was able to present it in the characters in her novels with great understanding and sympathy. The contrast seemed especially odious to many Victorians.

What struck me especially was her ability to see through the common attitudes of her time about the differences between men and women and what, supposedly, each was able to do. This comes through very clearly in the opening chapters of Middlemarch titled “Miss Brooke.” Dorothea Brooke, who was most likely modeled on the author herself, is a very idealistic, religious person, eager to be able to put her religious beliefs into practice to do some good in the world. She is intelligent, but she is also capable of misjudging persons. There is a gathering consisting of her down-to-earth sister, Celia, her garrulous windbag stepfather, Mr. Brooke, a neighbor, Sir James Chettham, who would like to marry Dorothea, and a newcomer clergyman, Mr. Casaubon, to whom Dorothea is attracted. Sir James wants to send over a horse each day for her to ride, but Dorothea is not interested.

When Miss Brooke was at the tea-table, Sir James came to sit down by her, not having felt her mode of answering him at all offensive. Why should he? He thought it probable that Miss Brooke liked him, and manners must be very marked indeed before they cease to be interpreted by preconceptions either confident or distrustful. She was thoroughly charming to him, but of course he theorized a little about his attachment. He was made of excellent human dough, and had the rare merit of knowing that his talents, even if let loose, would not set the smallest stream in the county on fire; hence he liked the prospect of a wife to whom he could say, “What shall we do?”about this or that; who could help her husband out with reasons, and would also have the property qualification for doing so. As to the excessive religiousness alleged against Miss Brooke, he had a very indefinite notion of what it consisted in, and though that it would die out with marriage. In short, he felt himself to be in love in the right place, and was ready to endure a great deal of predominance, which, after all, a man could always put down when he liked. Sir James had no idea that he should ever like to put down the predominance of this handsome girl, in whose cleverness he delighted. Why not? A man’s mind—what there is of it—has always the advantage of being masculine,--as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm, and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.

Here we see, crystal clear, the basic feminist charge: the inequality of attitude and valuing of the single most important human capability: to think clearly.

In many ways George Eliot was not a strong feminist. She gave a very modest contribution to the founding of Girton College for Women at Oxford. She could not be recruited for many of the causes to which others tried to involve her. But she always stood for an equality of educational opportunity, because she could see so clearly the extent to which women were treated differently, discounted even when they exhibited superior strengths.

From Freud on, the question has been asked, “What do women want?” as though the answer were a great mystery. Women want to be judged and valued and promoted and listened to by the same standard by which we judge and value and promote and listen to men. And over a century after George Eliot, we still see differentials in earning power between men and women; many basic decisions about women’s lives such as the right to have an abortion are still decided by almost totally male legislatures and courts. Women still make up a rather small minority in Congress and most state legislatures. We have seen a very few women reach the top level of government power in international relations: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright, and Condoleezza Rice. Most of these things are run by men, but then they have men’s minds, so that “even their ignorance is of a sounder quality!”

We are hearing a good bit about equality these days, and we are going to continue to hear about it. It is good to look back and see how difficult it has been for many groups to achieve equality, and how much nonsense they had to contend with along the way.