Eliot's Angels

Ren Girards mimetic theory opens up ways to make sense of the tension between the progressive politics of George Eliot and the conservative moralism of her narratives. In this innovative study, Bernadette Waterman Ward offers an original rereading of George Eliots work through the lens of Ren Girards theories of mimetic desire, violence, and the sacred. It is a fruitful mapping of a twentieth-century theorist onto a nineteenth-century novelist, revealing Eliots understanding of imitative desire, rivalry, idol-making, and sacrificial victimization as critical elements of the social mechanism. While the unresolved tensions between Eliots realism and her desire to believe in gradual social amelioration have often been studied, Ward is especially adept at articulating the details of such conflict in Eliots early novels. In particular, Ward emphasizes the clash between the ruthless mechanisms of mimetic desire and the idea of progress, or, as Eliot stated, growing good; Eliots Christian sympathy for sacrificial victims against her general rejection of Christianity; and her resort to Nemesis to evade the systemic injustice of the social sphere. The angels in the title are characters who appear to offer a humanist way forward in the absence of religious belief. They are represented, in Girardian terms, as figures who try to rise above the snares of the mimetic machine to imitate Christs self-sacrifice but are finally rendered ineffectual. Very few studies have tackled Eliots short fiction and narrative poetry. Eliots Angels gives the short fiction its due, and it will appeal to scholars of mimetic and literary theory, Victorianists, and students of the novel.