I do not know why Eliot wrote Felix Holt as an “ineffectual
protagonist,” but I think the brief Gramsci reading points to some important
reasons why Felix never gains any footing with his working class
compatriots. The three scenes that come
to mind take place with the public house and Johnson (1.11), his public speech
where he lampoons Johnson and is taken as more funny than a serious political
agent (2.30), and finally the riot (2.33), where he is ultimately unable to
sway the mass away from the Transome estate and carry out his half-thought plan
of protection. Felix never lacks in
intellectual and political fervor, but he simply finds no "personal" connection with
anyone other than Lyon or Esther.
When reading these scenes, I remember thinking repeatedly,
“The other liberals and the workers are just not his people,” and Gramsci seems to know why:
“Only if the relationship between intellectuals and
people-masses, between the leaders and the led, between the rulers and the
ruled is based on an organic attachment in which impassioned sentiment becomes
understanding and hence knowledge (not mechanically but in a living manner),
only then is the relationship one of representation.”
Felix holds such a strong sense of his personal
philosophical commitments—“against privilege, monopoly, and oppression” (182)—that
he does not have the capability to see the workers as equals; he puts the kart
before the horse in his quest of class solidarity and ideological integrity. As
Gramsci warns, Felix’s “impassioned sentiment” never makes the leap to
“understanding” or the production of knowledge “in a living manner.” But I have
to admit that given his pains—grabbing a weekly beer with workers, taking in the
orphan boy, becoming a tradesmen—I was surprised that he does not find any
working class friends, or even real acquaintances. Of course, the working class does not owe
Felix any respect for doing what he has done, and I wonder if in the end some
recognition from the lower classes is what he wanted. There seems something fundamentally right
about what Gramsci says, but it seems to that in order to achieve what he is
talking about, the Italian Marxist assumes a certain level of humility in the
successful “organic attachment” Eliot does not afford our hero in the
novel. In other words, Felix suffers
from a personal failing that restricts political success, and for Gramsci, the
political act must flow from a sense of personal solidarity with other people
that only comes through a long process of a sort of social attunement. Felix's attempts to converge with the working class do not render him any ipso facto attachment or belonging with them, which points to an interesting aspect of class movement in the novel: while one might be able to willingly move up (over time and with much effort or a bit of legal luck), it is somehow more difficult for someone to willingly move down in status and remain unscathed.
Matt,
ReplyDeleteI think the question of downward mobility is an interesting one because it is one not typically dealt with. After all, why would someone want to lower their social status? It is this opinion, common to (I assume) most people, which Felix has to struggle against in the novel. For someone who is trying to gain upward mobility and is regarded as “other” by the higher social strata, there is no suspicion in the movements. They might be looked down upon, but their motives are apparent. For Felix, there must be some suspicion among the working class for why he would choose to remain among them. While he might not dress or have a living situation or any of the other material markings of social status, he is educated. The common man, as is often commented upon, is unable to follow his speeches. He is misunderstood. This contributes, I think, to his inability to gain peers among the working class.
Matt,
ReplyDeleteI think you make a really great point here about the rigid nature of social/economic class in Victorian England. In answer to your question about mobility down the social/economic scale, I think mobility downward can only come as a product of economic loss in order for the other members of the lower class to read the individual as being authentically apart of their new class. An individual that enters a lower class as a visitor, be it as a political, religious, or charitable entity, is a stranger with an agenda and any attempt at making connection with the people of this lower class seems disingenuous. A more likely candidate for representation would be a person who rises out of a lower class and makes it to the political arena with those connections intact. However, upward mobility is nearly just as impossible because higher classes are just as skeptical of intruders as the lower classes. That is why the strategy of branding a political candidate as “the everyman” seems to be the only solution to the current class dilemma. One needs training, finances, and access to power to create change and that cannot be accomplished by one of low station in this social climate. However, one cannot flaunt high class practices and hope to connect with the layman. That’s why buying working men beer positions a candidate as understanding friend and the intoxicated masses fail to find fault in such a man.
Matt,
ReplyDeleteYou made an excellent point about Felix not being able to establish any personal connections with his fellow working men. He clearly sets himself apart from the workers and, as you rightly put it, fails to see them as equals. The question I raised in my post is whether Felix actually understands that the shortcomings of the workers are directly tied to their socio-economic oppression (i.e., they are not natural endowments). While upon first reading it may appear that he does, I think that such a reading can easily be complicated. According to Felix, there are two forms of power the workers can attain, namely, one that supposedly does “mischief” and “makes misery” (304) and one that is defined by “public opinion—the ruling belief in society about what is right and what it wrong, what is honorable and what is shameful” (306). Such a conservative-moralistic point of view makes clear that Felix holds very little faith in the workers’ “character” and that he is suspicious of them having any real power. What is also clear, however, is that he himself is quite desirous of power and, more precisely, power over the workers (even admitting at one point that he wants to be a “demagogue”). With regard to Gramsci’s theoretical remarks, I think that you were spot-on when you observed that “the Italian Marxist assumes a certain level of humility in the successful ‘organic attachment’ Eliot does not afford our hero in the novel.” But although I have a great deal of respect for Gramsci’s thought, I find the metaphysical binary on which he structures his remarks problematic. To assert that the people feel but do not understand and the intellectual understands but does not feel is to ignore the deep social-historical reasons in which this supposed opposition is grounded. Lastly, I could be wrong, but I think that Gramsci’s point is (or should be) that social “connectedness” is what preserves oppression rather than alleviating it.
Andrew, I'm intrigued by your last sentence. What do you mean by it?
DeleteYes -- Felix has all the trappings of Gramsci's organic intellectual -- he isn't a class carpetbagger come to preach them wisdom from another social & economic location, but at the same time he doesn't take his social & economic location as a significant foundation for reaching others. I'm not sure Felix is downwardly mobile, but he doesn't seem to care about his relationship to the means of production. He seems to value working class status for the ethical values it enables him to claim -- anti-materialism and hard artisanal work.
ReplyDelete