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A contribution to: Melancholy

Edited by Joanna Neilly and Alex Stuart

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 6

Modern Humanities Research Association

open

Abstract.  This article reassesses George Eliot and Baruch Spinoza’s ideas about the ethical salience of two modes of sorrow: anguish and melancholia. Although Eliot finished translating Spinoza’s Ethics in 1856, one year before publishing her first work of fiction, the only book-length account of the influence of Spinoza’s moral treatise on Eliot’s ethical fiction remains Dorothy Atkins’s George Eliot and Spinoza (1978). This article challenges Atkins’s thesis that Eliot ‘dramatizes’ the process of total liberation from the passions that Spinoza ‘describes’. Spinoza distinguished between three kinds of knowledge: knowledge of the first kind, which includes all knowledge afforded by the passions and is the sole cause of falsity; rational knowledge, which concerns the eternal structure of reality; and intuitive knowledge, which concerns the unchanging essence of things apart from their relations. Once it is understood that passion-ideas are only fallible because they – and they alone – concern the relation between particular bodies, it becomes evident that the same thing that makes them ‘inadequate’ in an epistemological sense makes them necessary as a means of working out how to live. The object of this article is to compare Spinoza and Eliot’s responses to this fact. In Section I, an analysis of Will Ladislaw’s passions in Chapter Seventy-Eight of Middlemarch (1871-2) enables us to recognise how Spinoza and Eliot anticipated neurobiologist Antonio Damasio in acknowledging that the passions provide the foundation for all subsequent moral reasoning. In Section II, the work of Spinoza scholar Michael Lebuffe sheds light on the means by which Dorothea Casaubon distinguishes ‘good’ from ‘bad’ passions in Chapter Eighty of Middlemarch. Finally, in Section III, a turn to Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story (1857) and a critical assessment of Spinoza’s ideas about intuitive cognition enables us to trace the discrepancy between Spinoza and Eliot’s ethics back to a fundamental difference in their thoughts about that most problematic passion, melancholia.

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