Regret Without Limit: The Ends of Agency and Genre in George Eliot's Middlemarch

Abstract

Using George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) as its primary textual example, this essay considers regret as an emotion that responds, simultaneously, to our inability to control the consequences of our actions and our enduring responsibility toward others. Regret, in this context, exposes the inherent constraints that Enlightenment models of autonomy face. The essay further argues that this experience of regret and endless responsibility potentially results in a retreat from acting altogether—a retreat that manifests itself generically in Romantic and post-Romantic poetics as the bifurcation of lyric and narrative. Middlemarch thus not only invites us to consider the relationship between autonomy and regret but also how genre theory can be understood as a pragmatics of action.