Review of George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism

George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism argues that Eliot abandons realism in her last two novels in favour of medievalism, and that recognizing the presence and function of medieval discourses in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda enables subversive political readings. Johnston positions these readings against criticism of the novels that identifies a collapse of narrative coherence and characterization in Eliot\u27s \u27failure\u27 to sustain their apparent realism. In contrast, Johnston proposes that Eliot\u27s manipulation of medievalism signals neither the failure of realism nor realism\u27s antithesis. Johnston argues that the discourses of medievalism that Eliot manipulates share a facility for transformation: hagiography (saints\u27 lives), allegory and romance are \u27flexible, capable of changing shape, of shifting from a type of realism, into fantasy, and sometimes back again\u27 (26). Eliot uses these archaic forms to confront contemporary issues and enable a \u27shifting political perspective that can accommodate the unlikely and the unexpected\u27, to craft a novel of reform (Middlemarch) and a novel of regeneration (Daniel Deronda) (17). Johnston demonstrates convincingly that Eliot\u27s version of medievalism recalls an age in transition, and that she returns to medieval structures in order to depict improbable and unlikely transformations in the Victorian age, another period of rapid change. Johnston\u27s reading of Middlemarch aims to defend Dorothea Brooke\u27s centrality through examination of Dorothea, Ladislaw and Lydgate via the interpretative model offered by medieval discourses. Dorothea\u27s life is considered in relation to the lives of female saints, Lydgate is a failed hero in the tradition of romance, and Ladislaw is patterned on the Dreamer figure of allegory. Johnston\u27s discussion of Eliot\u27s research into hagiographies of female saints is fascinating, demonstrating how Eliot drew on Anna Jameson\u27s commentaries on St Theresa as an active reformer in the characterization of Dorothea. Johnston also investigates Eliot\u27s references to the saints Barbara, Clara, Dorothea and Catherine, tracing Dorothea\u27s progress from passive immurement to escape via these saints\u27 lives. She argues that Dorothea\u27s characterization through medieval hagiography is a submerged metaphor for her suppression, and that when she discards restraint after Casaubon\u27s death hagiography is supplanted by a secular narrative. The saints cease to be invoked and Dorothea walks away from the tomb, thus overturning the hagiographic model in which the tomb marks the end of the saint\u27s narrative