George Eliot’s Remainder-Man

In an epigraph to one of the chapters of Felix Holt, George Eliot likens vulgar jokers to a turkey-cock: “it has a cruel beak,” she writes, “and a silly iteration of ugly sounds…”. This paper is about cruel beaks and silly iterations, about verbal aggression and repetition in George Eliot’s writings. In particular, I’m curious about what seems at first like a stylistic tic, a way she has of fixing on a somewhat odd word or phrase and of repeating it two or three or more times within the space..