Particular Webs:Middlemarch,Typologies, and Digital Studies of Women's Lives

Abstract

[H]e was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation … to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes.—George Eliot,MiddlemarchIt would be hard to discover a theoretical or aesthetic approach to George Eliot'sMiddlemarchthat is not already anticipated in some way by the novel's sagacious narrator. Possibly that persona, the quintessential Victorian polymath, does not foresee digital humanities as we know it. But critics have been struck as much by Eliot's prototyping of information systems, semiotics, and network analysis as by her humanist ethics. Casaubon does not invent the database of myths any more than Lydgate discovers DNA, or than Marian Evans Lewes rivals Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. As I illustrate a kind of digital research that adjusts to the minute particulars of narrative, I hope to keep sight of historical distances between the 1830s, the 1870s, and the era of feminist Victorian studies that I sketch here. Lydgate's penetrative “invention,” in the epigraph, is associated elsewhere in the novel with his actual “flesh-and-blood” vitality: “He cared not only for ‘cases,’ but for John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth” (Middlemarch, chap. 15). He is as dedicated to evidence as the narrator, in many scientific analogies, counsels readers to be, and yet he approaches his own life story and the characters of women with a kind of prejudgment that filters out most data. Eliot's readers, seeing Lydgate's errors, are flattered into believing we miss no signals and see all analogies. Can contemporary readers appreciate both numerical cases and individual stories of women? In this article I try to outline a feminist criticism that encompasses both typological classifications and flesh-and-blood individuality, both digital research and interpretative advocacy.