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They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.1
-Friedrich Nietzche, Twilight of the Idols
Thus spoke Nietzsche, consigning George Eliot's secularized reconstruction of Christian morality to theoretical obsolescence. His reasoning is swiftand devastating: Christianity is a fully integrated system held together by the requirement of absolute obedience to God. Deprived of recourse to a deity, English intellectuals à la Eliot aspire to intercalate the system with natural substitutes, naïvely imputing justifications for inscrutable axioms of faith. As Eliot's search for the ontological origins of divine orders comes up dry, she resorts to asserting Christianity's ascetic self-abasement with ever greater zealotry, as though a surfeit of affect- her much-vaunted "sympathy"-will sustain an edifice built on pillars of sand. Nietzsche's final twist of the knife comes in observing her recrudescence of penance. In a self-mutilating attempt to salve bad conscience, she flogs herself in expiation of an illusory debt so as to expunge iniquity and arrive at redemption. In short order, Nietzsche had erected one more tombstone, nestled next to God, in the graveyard of modernity.
We wince in awe at the brutal celerity with which Nietzsche dispatches George Eliot's theory-only to open our eyes and find it curiously unscathed. A phalanx of scholarly Frankensteins has long since reanimated Eliot's moral corpus, without quite looking into the German etiology of its necrosis.2 Modern critics celebrate as the agent of ethical transformation the same conceptual nucleus-her moral perfectionism-that Nietzsche dissects as incoherent and self-negating. I turn to Nietzsche in this essay because he articulates with unmatched clarity how the Christian concept of redemption operates on an irrational principle of debt dischargement, and he extends this same indictment to invalidate Eliot's secular moral perfectionism. Thus, Nietzsche's intercession becomes an occasion to reevaluate the consensus, articulated most prominently by Andrew Miller, that Eliot's fiction is ethically organized around the perfectionist ambition to "realize an ideal self,...