Esther and the Politics of Multiple Tastes in George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical
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The purpose of this essay is to re-evaluate the significance of Esther regarding her enactment of sympathy, as opposed to critics’ contention that Felix Holt is a mouthpiece of George Eliot in the novel Felix Holt, the Radical. It examines how sympathy functions in subverting the discourses of moral imperatives and instrumental reason. In the novel, the hegemonic authority exercises its dominant power over working-class habits and female aesthetic tastes in order to discipline them under the categorical and preemptive imperatives of a morality sustained by Enlightenment reason. Felix Holt is a novel of feminine resistance against male desire to categorize women as morally inferior objects and as values of economic exchange. The novel presents Esther Lyon as the sympathetic agent of a hybridity that combines her natural aesthetic taste with her acquired moral taste. The hybridity of her tastes denotes Esther’s renewed feminine subjectivity, which empowers her to invest her libido in both the domestic and the public spheres. Eliot endorses Esther by revealing that the female subject is not only able to adjust herself to the moral, economic, political, and sexual discourses of patriarchy but is also able to resist them for the fulfillment of her libidinal desires and for the enlargement of her sympathy for others.
Abstract
The purpose of this essay is to re-evaluate the significance of Esther regarding her enactment of sympathy, as opposed to critics’ contention that Felix Holt is a mouthpiece of George Eliot in the novel Felix Holt, the Radical. It examines how sympathy functions in subverting the discourses of moral imperatives and instrumental reason. In the novel, the hegemonic authority exercises its dominant power over working-class habits and female aesthetic tastes in order to discipline them under the categorical and preemptive imperatives of a morality sustained by Enlightenment reason. Felix Holt is a novel of feminine resistance against male desire to categorize women as morally inferior objects and as values of economic exchange. The novel presents Esther Lyon as the sympathetic agent of a hybridity that combines her natural aesthetic taste with her acquired moral taste. The hybridity of her tastes denotes Esther’s renewed feminine subjectivity, which empowers her to invest her libido in both the domestic and the public spheres. Eliot endorses Esther by revealing that the female subject is not only able to adjust herself to the moral, economic, political, and sexual discourses of patriarchy but is also able to resist them for the fulfillment of her libidinal desires and for the enlargement of her sympathy for others.
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