We have seen how George Eliot's search for ‘a language subtle enough to follow the utmost intricacies of the soul's pathways’ results in complex syntactical presentations of consciousness, from the intensely personal and concentrated focus on Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss to the wider community of individualized thought-processes in Felix Holt. The carefully constructed passages of psycho-narration throughout the works increase the potential of full sympathetic connection between character and reader. But a clearer sense of individuality is not everything, for we must also come to understand that individuality in the context of human relationships. I would like to return to a previously cited observation made by critic Gillian Beer:

It is in Beer's discussion of ‘imbalances of feeling’ that some of those most difficult moments in George Eliot's fiction become particularly relevant. We need only remind ourselves of those subtle shifts between Romola and Tito as Romola begins to sense the irreconcilable distance between herself and her husband even as he remains her husband, or of the empty emotional space between Mrs Transome and Harold as the mother longs for the love of a son who has never fully existed.

Aubrey de Vere (1814–1902)

[See also 1842, 1855, 1861 and 1893]

To an Infant

FAMILIAR Spirit! that so graciously

Dost take whatever fortune may befall;

Trusting thy fragile form to the arms of all,

And never counting it indignity

To be caressed upon the humblest knee;

Thou, having yet no words, aloud dost call

Upon our hearts: the fever and the gall

Of our dark bosoms are reproved in thee.

From selfish fears and lawless wishes free,

Thou hast no painful feeling of thy weakness;

From shafts malign and pride's base agony

Protected by the pillows of thy meekness—

Thou hast thy little loves which do not grieve thee,

Unquiet make thee, or unhappy leave thee.

‘Nations, their mission o'er, their office done’

NATIONS, their mission o'er, their office done,

Are forcibly drawn downwards: and that tide

Which raised them, homeward summoned doth subside.

What man by art can stay the sinking sun,

Or Spring departing when her goal is won?

States too are transient! longer none may bide

When once, its lesson taught or place supplied,

That steadying weight by it sustained is gone.

Be wise then, States! Whate'er the course ye hold,

Strive that your furthest aim subservient be

To the virtuous progress of Humanity.

Woe to that greatness which commercial gold

Alone creates, or seals. Such leaves no trace,

Sinking—and lighter things float up into its place.

The characteristic setting of late nineteenth century realist theatre is the room, a domestic space enclosed by walls on three sides of the stage, and often by a ceiling too, with the fourth side open to the auditorium. The fundamental conceit of illusionist staging is that the audience look in on another, self-contained, world. The actors cross the threshold from the real private space of the dressing room into the public space of the stage as if they were entering the private space of a domestic room from the public world outside. The practice of darkening the auditorium, widespread by the end of the century, helped concentrate audience attention on a facsimile world, parallel to, rather than directly interactive with, their own. The proscenium arch framing the stage figured as an imaginary barrier between stage and auditorium. It was, in Jean Jullien's words, ‘a fourth wall, transparent for the public, opaque for the actor’. Jullien was writing in response to the stagings at André Antoine's Théâtre Libre, in Paris, but the phrase was quickly appropriated as a general shorthand for the new realistic theatre that emerged throughout Europe in response to Zola's polemics, Ibsen's plays and reports of Antoine's stagings. This imaginary barrier, not-quite-wall and not-quitewindow, is fundamental to the achievement as well as the contradictions inherent in illusionist theatre.

In illusionist theatre, the set, a temporary structure, must appear permanent, its walls seem solid, and the actors who appear within it must seem to be the characters they impersonate.

Josiah Conder (1789–1855)

The Monthly Prayer-Meeting for Missions

COME to the house of prayer. It is the night

When, by a compact sweeter than command,

Their mutual prayers, throughout this happy land,

The scattered family of Christ unite.

Nor here alone observed the simple rite,

In western climes prolonged, by many a band

In busy town, lone wild, or coral strand;—

Where'er the Gospel shines, a beacon light.

Taught by one Spirit, all their prayers agree.

This night, the self-exiled for Christ can dare

Dwell on dear friends he ne'er again may see:

The thought is balm, that on their hearts they bear

His name while blending thus in harmony

The vows of faith. Come to the house of prayer.

The Cross

“God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.” “Be ye reconciled to God.”—2 Cor. v. 19, 20.

MYSTERIOUS ambassage! Be reconciled,

Man, to thy Maker: to thy God return,

Poor, ruined wanderer, nor thy Saviour spurn,

Who woos thy stubborn heart in terms so mild.

Yield to his love, and be again a child.

Humbly accept what thou couldst never earn.

Look to THE CROSS, and there thy guilt discern;

And in that fountain wash thy soul defiled.

Only believe and love.—Distasteful creed!

More harsh than harshest lore of Stoic school,

Carthusian penance, or Franciscan rule,

To man's proud heart; and terms that far exceed

His reach, until he knows himself a fool,

Accepts the boon, and finds it grace indeed.

The opening of the third book of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship Years) is one of the most arresting moments in the history of the novel. Without explanation, without context, the reader encounters a lyric poem in three stanzas, and readers of the first edition in 1795 found opposite it, on a fold-out page, a musical score that provides a setting for the poem. After the text of the song comes the context. Wilhelm is in his room when he hears someone playing a musical instrument outside his door, on the threshold. At first he thinks it is the Harpist, who had been playing and singing outside his door the previous evening. But when he hears the singer's voice, he realises it is Mignon. He opens the door, she crosses the threshold and sings the song that becomes her signature tune and one of Goethe's best-known poems: ‘Kennst du das Land?’ (‘Do you know the land?’).

The positioning of Mignon and her song on the threshold both of the printed text (the third book begins the second separate volume in the first edition) and of the fictional scene is hardly an accident. Mignon will remain on the margins of Wilhelm's life and and of his angle of perception throughout the novel. In one of its most fraught episodes, when Wilhelm and the company of actors he has assembled around him have been celebrating their successful performance of Hamlet, Mignon plans to enter his bedroom, but from the stairs, outside his door, she sees Philine go in and close the door behind her.

Middlemarch is a novel that focuses on the difficulty of existing within a marriage that lacks both love and intimacy—the pain of a relationship, like the family relationships in Adam Bede, where the two people involved should be close. But George Eliot also had an interest in relationships that were not so outwardly straightforward. We see a hint of this in Middlemarch, when she chooses to introduce the character of Tertius Lydgate at a dinner-party celebrating Dorothea Brooke's engagement to Edward Casaubon. Lydgate and Dorothea are observed by fellow guests to be having ‘a very animated conversation’ about ‘cottages and hospitals’, but there is no indication that the characters’ first meeting involves the discussion of anything more personal than a shared interest in philanthropy. This particular chapter then closes, and the beginning of the next continues, with narratorial announcements that further block the possibility of a deeper mutual intimacy between the pair in the most traditional romantic sense—announcements of Dorothea's actual marriage and Lydgate's attraction to a very different kind of woman. Still the narrator breaks in soon after with an observation from the opposite angle, offering a possible future link between them in spite of their present distance:

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)

[See also 1848, 1849, 1850, 1853, 1855, 1856, 1862, 1866, 1869, 1870, 1875, 1881, 1882, 1890, 1893 and 1896]

Lady Isabella

They knelt in silent anguish by her bed,

And could not weep; but calmly there she lay;

All pain had left her; and the sun's last ray

Shone through upon her, warming into red

The shady curtains. In her heart she said:

“Heaven opens; I leave these and go away;

The bridegroom calls,—shall the bride seek to stay?”

Then low upon her breast she bowed her head.

O lily flower, O gem of priceless worth,

O dove with patient voice and patient eyes,

O fruitful vine amid a land of dearth,

O maid replete with loving purities,

Thou bowedst down thy head with friends on earth

To raise it with the saints in Paradise.

(Written 1847; privately printed 1847)

[In 1866 the above sonnet was re-titled and published as ‘A Portrait II’. The sonnet, ‘Saint Elizabeth of Hungary’, 1850, became ‘A Portrait I’.]

Vanity of Vanities

“Ah woe is me for pleasure that is vain!

“Ah woe is me for glory that is past!

“Pleasure that bringeth sorrow at the last;

“Glory that at the last bringeth no gain!”

So saith the sinking heart; and so again

It shall say till the mighty angel-blast

Soundeth, making the sun and moon aghast

And showering down the stars like sudden rain. […]

A threshold is physically crossed in one of the most striking visual sequences in Satyajit Ray's 1984 film, Ghare Baire (The Home and the World). It is a cinematic moment filled with expectation, prefaced by the narratorial voice of the film's protagonist, Bimala. On this day, we learn, the 12th of Agrahayan, B.S. 1314 (26 November 1907), the young mistress of the zamindari of Sukhsayar, for the first time in the family's history, stepped out of the inner, women's quarters (the andarmahal) of the house to entertain a guest in its outer apartments.

The diegetic framing of the sequence appears to cite the film's own framing by a literary text, Rabindranath Tagore's novel of the same name (serialised 1915–16). But this is an illusion. The moment itself belongs entirely to the film's field of vision; it is missing in the novel, which contains no textual counterpart to Bimala's voiced commentary. With the exception of that voice, the sequence is silent. The pale green doors of the andarmahal swing open, and two graceful, formally-dressed figures – Bimala and her husband Nikhilesh – emerge into a light-filled gallery. The camera's eye focuses for a moment on the pair's feet, shod in decorative slippers, then moves up to track their transit through the corridor, panelled in stained glass that casts an unearthly radiance on the scene. As they reach the open doors at its end and emerge into the long, pillared verandah, with its slender European statues on raised pediments, the pace diminishes to lyrical slow motion.

Introduction: Global Integration, Violence, and Regional Normalisation

With their six mineriade (literally, miners' quests), the violent marches and actual and threatened invasions of Bucharest spanning the years 1990 to 1999, Romania's Jiu Valley miners forcefully thrust themselves and their region into world consciousness. Analysts often explain these outbursts as essential Romanian experiences, existing apart from other connections and interrelationships (Gledhill 2005; Vasi 2004). However, as this essay and others (Jack Friedman 2003; Rus 2007) suggest, the nature of Jiu Valley social and political life, miner activism, and changing regional inequalities must also be linked to the workings of large-scale international processes and relationships that articulate with national and local political economies. In particular, within this chain of relationships the changing conditions of labour, imbalances set in motion by labour migration, and a new kind of international dependency especially undergird developing inequality and differentiation and contribute both to the decline of violence and the emptiness of politics. The focus of this paper is the transformation of one Romanian region from a place dominated by a mono-industrial, rugged, working-class culture to one with differentiated but declining labour. Such a process is duplicated over and over throughout the world today, where contestation is neutralised, and politics, economy, and the market are replaced by global administration as regions become integrated into networks managed by international institutions and actors, and dependent on them for livelihood and hence survival.

Prosaic Rhythm

Felix Holt is generally seen as a novel of solid political and social commentary; this story of a ‘Radical’ whose beliefs are revolutionary only in the sense that they are not what is traditionally accepted as radical is also understood by many critics to be a political failure. Terry Eagleton seems to view the title as something of a naïve misnomer, citing the novel's ultimate lack of political action due to a ‘reformist trust in moral education’ coupled with ‘a positivist suspicion of political change’. Eagleton, along with other critics both Victorian and current, also finds the title-character himself quite troubling, for like Romola, Felix's consciousness fails to emerge from the text as vividly as that of a Maggie Tulliver, a Silas Marner, even a Tito Melema. In the introduction to the Clarendon edition of the novel, Fred C. Thomson hypothesizes that the political aspects of the text were actually a secondary thought and that George Eliot's first inspiration for the work was the tragedy of the Transome family, an argument that would help to explain the perceived distance between Felix and readerly sympathy, as well as between Felix and political action. Yet I would like to argue that Felix's is more of a constructive failure than that which we see in Romola, and not only in the fact that Felix himself manages to escape Romola's state of permanent personal isolation.

Henry Alford (1810–1871)

[See also 1841]

Passion-Week, 1845

AGAIN the solemn season—and again

That bleeding Brow, those wounded Hands and Feet—

Again that piercèd Side my vision meet;

Afresh that holy Form is bowed with pain.

O Thou, the all-sufficing Victim, slain

For man's transgression; by Thy mercy sweet,

From God's right hand of power, Thy glory-seat,

To look upon Thy sorrowing people deign.

Unworthy, Lord, unworthy of Thy name,

Behold Thy sinful Church; by hatred rent,

In the vain world, and not in Thee, content:

Cast us not off, O Lord! in deepest shame,

On bended knees, we utter our lament,

Up to Thy throne in daily sighing sent.

That Day Was the Preparation, and the Sabbath Drew On

RISE and depart, thou highly-flavoured one,

From the sad cross, by thine adopted led:

Enough of bitter tears hath now been shed:

“Behold thy mother, and behold thy son.”

The meed of promised glory is not won,

The Prince of Life is numbered with the dead;

Each lingering hope of blessedness hath fled;

The treason hath been wrought—the dark deed done.

Thus down the steep of cruel Calvary

Passed those two holy mourners, hand in hand:

But as the brooding darkness from the land

Rose curtain-like, so comfort cheerily

Broke dawning on their hearts, and visions high

Of glory yet unshaped went dimly by.

In George Eliot's 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss, a young Maggie Tulliver criticizes her brother Tom's faulty method of recitation by telling him:

As with many of Maggie's speeches, this one reverberates deeply in its apparent simplicity, prompting the reader to a second, subconscious admission: these lines are a definitive acknowledgment of the effect of ‘;stops’, or punctuation, on the performative aspect of a text. Having identified the presence and purpose of the vibratory movements of George Eliot's prose, our next step is to examine the mechanics of their creative process-a process that is rooted in the enormous impact that a small notation may have on sentence structure. For even within the mind, those ‘;stops’ that are individual commas, semicolons and other punctuation marks are cues for the ‘simultaneously summoned and silenced enunciation’ that naturally occurs in the soundless internal performance of a text that is silent reading. They subliminally affect how we hear and feel a literary work, creating distinct rhythms and patterns at the microscopic level that shape macroscopic context. The issue of the importance of punctuation is particularly relevant in light of studies of The Mill on the Floss within the last thirty years.