Authorial intrusion in three of George Eliot's novels : Scenes of clerical life, The mill on the floss and Middlemarch

Abstract

I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they are woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. (Middlemarch Bk. II, Ch. XV, p. 141) Subjectivity is one of the major themes in the 'Classic Realist Text', the dominant form of the novel in the nineteenth-century. The narrator in George Eliot' s novels, who is the 'I' of the discourse, directly addresses the reader as the subject 'You'. The following example occurs in Scenes of Clerical Life, in the third chapter of Mr Gilfil 's Love-Story: Meanwhile, if, as I hope, you feel some interest in Caterina and her friends at Cheverel Manor, you are perhaps asking, How came she to be there? I agree with Catherine Belsey when she writes that the 'interpellation (address) facilitates the interpolation (inclusion) of the reader in the narrative; he is encouraged to identify with the 'You' in the texts, through the narrator's confidential tone. According to Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson, Eliot's method of using familiar cultural assumptions and of invoking the 'I/You' relationship in her novels, brings about what Roland Barthes, in 1970, called the 'Cultural Code'. I believe this to be true, since in Eliot' s novels the relationship between the narrator and the reader is one often based on shared knowledge and meanings.