The illegitimacy of the colonial entrepreneur in George Eliot's Felix Holt.

Harold preferred a slow-witted large-eyed woman, silent and affectionate, with a load of black hair weighing much more heavily than her brains. He had seen no such woman in England, except one whom he had brought with him from the East. (George Eliot, Felix Holt 454-55, emphasis mine)

A series of uprisings spread throughout northern India in May, 1857, to protest the centennial of British rule there. Indian sepoys mutinied against their officers, dashing the colonial stereotype of the loyal Indian subject. Early reports of the uprising suggested that the rebellion was scattered and based on Indian religious superstitions. Rumor played a very significant role in accounts focusing on lurid descriptions of the mutilation, torture, rape, and enslavement of innocent Englishwomen. (1)

These tales of violence against innocent Englishwomen legitimized the ensuing British show of force, and, in fact, positioned such military violence as necessary response to Indian brutality. The violence inherent within colonialism was thus effaced and projected onto the figure of the uncivilized and barbaric Indian. The trope of the violated Englishwoman did not exist before the "Mutiny," Jenny Sharpe points out, in Allegories of Empire (68). This suggests that although the 1857 uprising was not the first instance of colonial rebellion, it was pivotal in marking a crisis in colonial legitimation and authority.

Recent postcolonial criticism has expanded the spectrum of texts that can be read as constructed by, and contributing to, the discourses of imperialism (including travel literature, journalism, conduct books, children's literature, and domestic novels). (2) Discussions of imperialism and literature have been reconceptualized to include even those texts whose feminine, domestic subjects are marked as explicitly removed from the foreign, the exotic, or the colonial.

I wish to discuss how dramatic accounts of the 1857 uprising affected British novels in which the colonial situation is not represented explicitly: does the trope of the Englishwoman as signifier of colonial authority significantly impact novels of the 1860s? I argue that the events of 1857 had an enormous effect on the British national consciousness and in particular on the role of women beyond the literature of the imperial project. However, novels do not offer one homogeneous response to this crisis in colonial legitimation; rather, they show the differing ways that issues in colonialism are domesticated and feminized. I focus here on how the male colonial project is appropriated and used as a metaphor to express issues of feminine agency and desire in George Eliot's Felix Holt.

Felix Holt, set during the period of the first Reform Bill of 1832 and titled for the novel's hero, a working-class Radical, is often regarded as George Eliot's "political novel" (Coveney 7). Yet, even the novel's graphic depiction of mob violence that follows a local election is eclipsed by the intricacies of the novel's domestic and romantic intrigues. The narrative of radical politics is often regarded as overshadowed by the birth-mystery plot involving Esther Lyon and by the intensity of Eliot's portrayal of Mrs. Transome--a gentlewoman disappointed with her marriage, her former lover, and the long-awaited return of her favorite son.

Critics have noted the centrality of Mrs. Transome in Felix Holt. F. R. Leavis argues that "it is in the part of Felix Holt dealing with Mrs. Transome that George Eliot becomes one of the great creative artists" (69), while Terry Eagleton claims that Mrs. Transome is the novel's "displaced center" (117). Yet, instead of reading Mrs. Transome, as Henry James does, as "unnatural" or "superfluous" to a presupposed main plot (42), I propose that the strength of her narrative suggests a provocative link between the politic/imperial and the domestic/romantic concerns. It is precisely this connection, between the struggle for (feminine) domestic power and the presence of colonial forces, that the above critics have misread. Even such a critic as Deirdre David, who links the female domestic concerns with male political action, insists on maintaining that dichotomy. She argues that

The male plot of corrupt contention for political leadership is so undermined by the female plot of abandoned mothers and illegitimate children that the political meaning of Felix Halt may be interpreted as a refutation of male political action. (199)

The domestic tragedy of Mrs. Transome's adulterous affair with the lawyer Jermyn and its humiliating aftermath do destroy her son's social identity, yet I wish to challenge David's argument that the female, "anarchic," emotional power of Mrs. Transome upholds the division between the male/political and the female/domestic and undermines the male political ambitions of her son. I want to focus here on what is represented as the central tragedy of the novel--the remorse of Mrs. Transome--and discuss how the figure of the colonial entrepreneur, Harold Transome, is implicated in his mother's ruin.

The novel opens with the long-awaited return of Harold Transome, who had left England as a young man to seek his fortune in the East (Smyrna). He became an imperial entrepreneur and returned home with the relatively large fortune of [pounds sterling]150,000. Within the tradition of literary second sons--like Bronte's Edward Rochester--Harold is denied an inheritance and therefore must venture into the colonies to earn his fortune. The eventual death of his older brother allows Harold to assume management of the almost bankrupt Transome estate. However, this return of the favorite son and wealthy colonial businessman is problematic; while Harold Transome improves the material conditions of the family estate, he is portrayed as fundamentally alienated from the values of the community and his family. The alienation is represented as a tragedy within the emotional economy of the novel and manifests itself in Harold Transome's disinterest in his mother and in his callous managerial approach to the family estate.

Mrs. Transome: The Displacement of Female Domestic Authority

Before her son's return, Mrs. Transome ran the family estate: "'I am used to be the chief bailiff and sit in the saddle two or three hours every day'" (95). She enjoyed both the practical authority of managing the house and grounds and the symbolic power of the sovereign: "she liked every little sign of power her lot had left her. She liked that a tenant should stand bareheaded below her as she sat on horseback" (106). Upon his return, however, Harold makes it clear that his mother's reign is over: "'You shall have nothing to do now but be grandmamma on satin cushions'" (95). The text positions Mrs. Transome as the object of the reader's sympathy, but there is also an implication that both her deposition and her resultant unhappiness are deserved. By committing adultery and usurping her husband's authority, she has transgressed the boundaries of acceptable feminine behavior. The novel uses a language of imperialism to depict her reign over the Transome estate:

She had a high-born imperious air which would have marked her as an object of hatred and reviling by a revolutionary mob. Her person ... would have fitted an empress in her own right, who had to rule in spite of faction, to dare the violation of treaties and dread retributive invasions, to grasp after new territories, to be defiant in desperate circumstances, and to feel a woman's hunger of the heart forever unsatisfied. (104)

The passage suggests that Mrs. Transome's (imperial) ambition is despotic in nature and also that her desire for sovereignty frustrates any chance for her romantic fulfillment.

Upon returning home, Harold Transome presents his mother with Indian shawls, imported commodities from his colonial entrepreneurship: "'you are straight as an arrow still; you will carry the Indian shawls I have brought you as well as ever'" (93). The Indian shawl is often mentioned in many mid-Victorian texts, most notably in Bronte's Jane Eyre, Gaskell's Cranford, and Emily Eden's The Semi-Detached House; it is used to signify an aristocratic femininity that is maintained by colonial adventuring. (3) Harold Transome uses the shawl as a way of placating his mother and silencing her complaints; he insists upon transforming her into an ornamental woman and the shawl helps to create an image of an indulged (and powerless) grandmother. When Harold Transome covers his mother in an Indian shawl, he symbolically displaces her authority and transforms her from an active (imperial) agent into a passive object of his own colonizing. Mr. Transome, Harold's imbecilic father, is described as sleeping with a "soft Oriental scarf which Harold had given him" (542), suggesting that he has long ago surrendered his authority to Mrs. Transome. Harold Transome's act of covering his mother with an Indian shawl encodes her as passive, as an eastern space under his domination. Mrs. Transome allows herself to be "disguised" by the shawl and the construction of upper-class femininity of which the shawl is a part, yet this mask adds to her imprisonment within that role.

Thus, the text characterizes Mrs. Transome as both the imperial empress of the Transome estate and later as the colonized subject of her son. This double move--the representation of Eliot's heroines as both colonizer and colonized--is discussed by Susan Meyer in her article on Daniel Deronda. Meyer argues that Gwendolen is initially described as "imperialistic" in her dealings with her family and in her early courtship with Grandcourt; however, once she marries Grandcourt, "it is Gwendolen, not Grandcourt, who is subject to another's empire; it is Gwendolen, not Grandcourt, whom the narrator compares to a slave" (735). Both Gwendolen and Mrs. Transome lose their domestic empires and become resigned to powerless positions at the end of each novel, suggesting, perhaps, the futility of a female imperial energy. Meyer argues that Daniel Deronda offers a possibility of escape through his new racial identity, while in Felix Holt Esther Lyon escapes the fate of Mrs. Transome through her marriage to Felix.

Mrs. Transome's good blood and aristocratic bearing, the novel suggests, allow her to wear these vestiges of the colonial venture. However, while the Indian shawl marks the relationship between colonial trading and the feminine space, it also cloaks the Western woman in an aesthetics of the exotic. Mrs. Transome uses the shawl as a costume with which she disguises her unhappiness over her marginalized role in her son's life:

Denner was putting the finishing touches to Mrs. Transome's dress by throwing an Indian scarf over her shoulders, and so completing the contrast between the majestic lady in costume and the Hecuba-like woman whom she had found half an hour before. (489)

Mrs. Transome's bitter disappointment over her son's inability to feel affection for her foreshadows a series of other disillusionments that Harold Transome engenders in the novel. Harold Transome fails in each of his social roles--as prodigal son, Radical candidate, and suitor of Esther--and these failures culminate in the final revelation of his illegitimacy. Although the novel does not explicitly suggest a link between colonial entrepreneurship and illegitimacy, it seems to suggest that the Transome lineage, which was based on suspect legal maneuvering, fittingly concludes with the abdication of the foreign businessman. The novel's implicit condemnation of Harold--he is dismissive of the pre-existing form of (domestic) government, is concerned only with profit, and is finally proven to have no legitimate claim to the estate--implicates the colonial project.

Harold Transome: The Illegitimate Colonial Entrepreneur

Harold Transome claims to have "oriental" tastes concerning women, and his foreign style of administration will not acknoweldge (Western) female authority: "'I hate English wives; they want to give their opinion about everything. They interfere with a man's life'" (94). The arrivals of both Felix Holt and Harold Transome disrupt their families and community, yet there is a marked difference in the "foreign" values they import. Felix Holt's new class identity (or at least rejection of his parents' desires for social mobility) and nostalgic desire for an organic working-class culture is a result of his travels through England. Harold Transome maintained his identity as an English gentleman while abroad and assumes he can resume his old social position in England. However, his years living in the East and his foreign marriage mark him as "other" according to the novel's codes of masculinity and Harold Transome returns home a foreigner with a "dark" son.

The change in Harold Transome--from a youthful English gentleman to a middle-aged colonial businessman--manifests itself especially in his attitude toward women. Harold's professed aversion to English women--although his later interest in Esther challenges this--contrasts them to the "silent and affectionate" (i.e. submissive and dumb) stereotype of Eastern women. The narrative voice here is ambiguous; it is unclear if this "language of orientalist misogyny" (Perera 82) is attributable to Harold or to the narrator. Is the passage a critical representation of Harold's orientalism, or does the novel sacrifice the subjectivity of the Eastern woman in order to highlight the mistreatment of Western women? (4) It is puzzling that the narrative does not attempt to explain the function of the woman "he had brought with him from the east" (455). Is the reader to assume that Harold Transome imported an Eastern slave to England, and would this woman necessarily be his mistress? This gap or "strategic absence" of the Eastern woman's narrative in a novel concerned with Western (British) women's subjectivity points to "the place where the colonial system of meaning breaks down" (Sharpe 23).

Later, when Harold Transome attempts to woo Esther Lyon, he admits that his son's mother "'had been a slave--was bought, in fact'" (541). It is unclear whether Harold married a former slave, or if he uses the term "wife" to describe his relationship with his former slave-mistress. Harold cannot conceive that this knowledge might affect Esther; the implication of this scene is that Harold (perhaps unknowingly) is operating within a foreign set of sexual codes.

It was impossible for Harold to preconceive the effect this had on Esther. His natural disqualification for judging of a girl's feelings was heightened by the blinding effect of an exclusive object--which was to assure her that her own place was peculiar and supreme. Hitherto Esther's acquaintance with Oriental love was derived chiefly from Byronic poems, and this had not sufficed to adjust her mind to a new story, where the Giaour concerned was giving her his arm. She was unable to speak." (541)

Esther's reaction is ambiguous. On one hand, the passage suggests that she is repulsed by Harold's relations with an eastern slave, yet the comparison to Byron's "Gaiour" denotes a romantic heroism. (5) Again, the text does not clarify the relationship between Harold and his foreign "wife." It seems notable that a novel that elaborately explains several characters' claims to inheritance and their family origins would leave murky this question of little Harry's lineage. His maternal lineage is obscured, yet a greater emphasis is placed on paternal lineage. Does the novel critique Harold's strategy of effacing the Eastern woman in order to allow Esther (the Western woman) a privileged, unique position? Yet the Eastern woman's story is never told.

Harold Transome's past involvement with female slaves is left unclear, yet the text explicitly encodes Harold as a despot who shows his tyrannical attitude in his relationships with both Mrs. Transome and Esther Lyon. The novel does not explicitly mark Harold Transome as a slave-owner, yet his relationships with women are described using the language of slavery and images of bondage. Despite Harold's politic civility and attempts to charm her, Esther perceives that "Harold had a padded yoke ready for the neck of every man, woman, and child that depended on him" (538). Marriage to Harold would be "a silken bondage that arrested all motive and was nothing better than a well-cushioned despair" (592).

While Harold is characterized as a subtle dictator, however, it is significant that his mastery is not overt:

Harold [had] practical cleverness--[a] masculine ease with which he governed everybody and administered everything about him, without the least harshness, and with a facile good nature which yet was not weak. (524, emphasis mine)

Harold's authority is described as an administrative power that seeks to efface itself in its very expression, much like the colonial authority of the mid-Victorian period, which sought to maintain an "informal empire" or "spheres of influence" rather than exhibit formal political authority (Porter 115).

Nevertheless, despite his covert style of control, Harold assumes total domestic authority. He uses his colonial wealth to improve the estate and establish himself as an English politician; yet his interest in England is presented as more dispassionate and acquisitive than affectionate:

"I often thought, when I was at Smyrna, that I would buy a park with a river through it as much like the Lapp as possible. Gad, what fine oaks those are opposite! Some of them must come down though. . . . All the country round here lies like a map in my brain. A deuced pretty country too; but the people were a stupid set of old Whigs and Tories." (95-96, emphasis mine)

Harold Transome intends to "improve" the estate by cutting down the oaks and restructuring the tenant system--plans which disregard and disrupt the management system his mother has employed all of the years he has been abroad. Harold does not recognize the validity of his mother's form of domestic government. Harold's disrespectful attitude toward his mother's management of the estate suggests that the authority of the returned colonial entrepreneur cannot coexist within the context of the feminine, domestic (national) authority.

Esther Lyon: The Feminine Bourgeois Principle

The possibility of Harold Transome's marrying Esther Lyon is the Transomes' last chance of legally maintaining the rights to their estate. Additionally, Esther is represented as the only way that Harold can cleanse himself of the contaminating attitude of orientalist misogyny. However, in order to become this feminine principle of salvation and moral agency, Esther Lyon must undergo a transformation brought on by Felix Holt's violent radicalism.

In her article "Why Political Novels Have Heroines," Ruth Yeazell argues that the love interest in political novels provides a cover, or a refuge from representations of violence:

these novels entertain the possibility of violence, even half-sympathize with it, only to take refuge at critical moments in the representation of female innocence, exchanging a politically dangerous man for a sexually unaggressive young woman, and a narrative that threatens drastic change for one that proves reassuringly static. (127)

Yeazell discusses how, in order to become a vehicle of redemption for Felix Holt, Esther Lyon must forgo her own social ambitions and pretentious gentility. Esther Lyon gives up her ambition so that she might have a greater power: womanly influence. Alison Booth argues that Felix Holt represents Eliot's belief in "an ideology of influence" in which "woman's vocation for sympathy [becomes] a basis for social reform" (144). However, in her analysis of Esther's transformation--from a social climber to a self-effacing heroine who willingly gives up her inheritance--Yeazell ignores the importance of Mrs. Transome as a negative example of frustrated feminine ambition.

The novel proposes a carefully-constructed code of feminine influence, one that Esther learns through the course of the novel and that Mrs. Transome fails to achieve. The novel shows that Esther's choice to marry Felix Holt is based on her desire to escape the fate of Mrs. Transome, a woman whose ambitions and transgressions have made her entirely dependent upon two despotic men: Jermyn, her former lover, and Harold, her son. Mrs. Transome describes her relationships with men by using the language of slavery:

There was that possibility of fierce insolence in this man who was to pass with those nearest to her as her indebted servant, but whose brand she secretly bore. She was as powerless with him as she was with her son. (203, emphasis mine)

Mrs. Transome foresees that, if Esther marries Harold, she, too, will enter into a role of bondage:

"This girl has a fine spirit--plenty of fire and pride and wit. Men like such captives, as they like horses that champ the bit and paw the ground: they feel more triumph in their mastery. What is the use of a woman's will?" (488)

Esther, whose beauty and refinement have encouraged her aspirations to become a gentlewoman, rejects the role of Harold's wife, in part because she realizes that his illegitimacy marks him as beyond redeeming.

Esther represents a reformation of Mrs. Transome's upper-class femininity. Initially, she is vain, graceful, and haughty, and rules over her father's domestic space without the humble affection that Felix Holt later teaches her:

In this small dingy house of the minister of Malthouse Yard there was a light-footed, sweet-voiced Queen Esther . . . [who] rules . . . with an air of confidence. . . , [a] blind willfulness that sees no terrors, no many-linked consequences, no bruises and wounds of those whose cord it tightens . . . . There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness. (160)

Esther unlearns this form of feminine authority, and, in fact, she renounces any superiority over her father precisely at the moment that she discovers her true parentage. Esther's renunciation--choosing Felix Holt over Harold Transome and giving up her claims to the Transome estate--involves a realization of the nature of appropriation; in order to claim her inheritance Esther must displace the Transomes:

now that her ladyhood was not simply Utopia, she found herself arrested and painfully grasped by the means through which the ladyhood was to be obtained. To her inexperience this strange story of an alienated inheritance, of such a last representative of pure-blooded lineage as old Thomas Transome the bill-sticker, above all of the dispossession hanging over those who actually held, and had expected always to hold, the wealth and position which were suddenly announced to be rightfully hers . . . compelled her to gaze on the degrading hard experience of other human beings, and on [their] humiliating loss. (474, emphasis mine)

Esther rejects the role of lady once she realizes that it can be obtained only through the appropriation of someone else's property. Thus the novel suggests that ladyhood--the genteel femininity embodied in Mrs. Transome--involves the imperial violence of invasion and seizure of property.

Although Esther rejects this kind of implied violence, her choice to marry Felix Holt and share in his project of helping the working class places her in a corollary position: the role of the missionary helpmate. Felix Holt's description of his plans to educate the working class employs the rhetoric of the colonial missionary:

"I shall go away as soon as I can to some large town, . . . some ugly, wicked, miserable place. I want to be a demagogue of a new sort; an honest one, if possible, will tell people they are blind and foolish." (366)

Esther's role as Felix's wife is to use her femininity to make his civilizing mission more comfortable. She accepts Felix Holt as her "law" and joins his project of "civilizing" the misguided poor.

Esther Lyon's rejection of Harold Transome and her decision to help Felix in his civilizing mission is a reversal of the romantic resolution of Jane Eyre, where the 'heroine refuses St. John Rivers' proposal and then marries the maimed Rochester. In contrast, Esther does not use her inheritance or her feminine civilizing power to rescue Harold Transome. Felix Holt's project of educating the poor is analogous to St. John Rivers' missionary work in Africa. Yet in Eliot's novel, the failed colonial adventurer (and second son) is not recuperated by marriage to the heroine, Esther Lyon. Thus Eliot's text constructs a complex critique of the possibility of integrating the colonial entrepreneur into the domestic, feminine space.

(1.) One contemporary account of Indian violence comes from Colin Campbell's Narrative of the Indian Revolt from Its Outbreak to the Capture of Lucknow: "Wives were stripped in the presence of their husbands' eyes, flogged naked through the city, violated there in the public streets, and then murdered. To cut off the breasts of the women was a favorite mode of dismissing them to death; and, most horrible, they were sometimes scalped ...." (20)

(2.) Sara Mills, The Discourse of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism (1991); Maiy Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Literature and Transculturation (1992); Jenny Sharpe. Allegories of Empire. The Figure of the Woman in the Colonial Text (1993); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993); Firdous Azim. The Colonial Rise of the Novel (1993); Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (1991); and David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (1993).

(3.) In Jane Eyre, the Indian shawl appears on Blanche Ingram's mother, the Dowager Lady Ingram, and it is a manifestation of the wealth that separates Jane from Rochester. When describing the haughty Dowager, Jane remarks on the significance of her wearing an Indian shawl: "A crimson velvet robe, and a shawl turban of some gold-wrought Indian fabric, invested her (I suppose she thought) with a truly imperial dignity" (161) In The Semi-Detached House, Captain Hopkinson, an employee of the East India Company, brings Indian shawls home to his wife and daughters, thereby facilitating their movement from middle- to upper-class social circles (153).

(4.) See Spivak for a discussion of how the subjectivity of the Western heroine is grounded upon the dehumanization of the non-white, colonial woman.

(5.) "The Giaour," a poem written by Byron in 1813, describes a Byronic hero who falls in love with a female slave. She is killed by her Turkish lord, Hassan, and Giaour avenges her death and then banishes himself to a monastery.

Works Cited

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Booth Alison. "Not All Men Are Selfish and Cruel: Felix Holt as a Feminist Novel." Greatness Engendered. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. New York: Bantam, 1987.

Campbell, Colin. Narrative of the Indian Revolt from Its Outbreak to the Capture of Lucknow. London: George Victers, 1858.

Coveney, Peter. "Introduction." Felix Holt. By George Eliot. Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1972.

David, Deirdre. "Subversive Sexual Politics." Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.

Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: NLB, 1976.

Eliot, George. Felix Holt, The Radical. 1866. Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin, 1972.

Leavis, F. R. Determinations: Critical Essays. London: Folcroft P, 1969.

Meyer, Susan. "Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre." Victorian Studies 3:2 (Winter 1990): 247-68

Mills, Sara. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism. London: Routledge, 1991.

Perera, Suvendrini. Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.

Porter, Bernard. The Lion's Share: A Short History of British Imperialism; 1815-1970. New York: Longman, 1975.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of the Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Spivak, Gayatari. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 243-61.

Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993.

Yeazell, Ruth. "Why Political Novels Have Heroines: Sybil, Mary Barton, and Felix Holt." Novel 18 (1985): 126-144.

University of Wisconsin--Green Bay