Student-Teacher Relations

If we were to try to distill the plot of Felix Holt into some sort of Cliff’s Notes essence, I’d wager we might focus less on political reformation and more on the Harold-Esther-Felix love triangle.  In fact, despite his presence throughout much of the novel, I find it difficult to think of Felix Holt as the protagonist at all; instead, I would hazard that Esther Lyon is the real center of Eliot’s text.  With Esther as the focus, we may then think of Felix not as an ineffectual political radical but rather view him as a profoundly effectual personal radical.  I would connect this to Vanden Bossche’s assertion that “Felix Holt displaces [education] onto Esther Lyon and in turn onto Holt himself” (7).  While Felix’s intent to educate the working classes seems doomed from the outset, his effect on Esther, as Vanden Bossche notes, causes her own “inward revolution” (464; ch. 49; Vanden Bossche 7), a revolution that may occur because she already inhabits a class outside that which she ultimately chooses.  Again, drawing from Vanden Bossche, Felix Holt succeeds not as a political reformer but alternately he does succeed as an agent of personal change—an agent of the “revolution that involves a transformation of the self into disinterested citizen” (9).

So Eliot’s novel, then, might be read as a neoliberal push for lifelong education and the responsibility of the individual to self-betterment or as an insistence on changing the self without correcting preexisting social inequalities via either violent or political force.  What I find useful, though, is Esther’s insistence that “[she] mean[s] to go on teaching a great many things” (474; ch. 51).  I suggest that while Eliot does insist on personal revolution as necessary for societal change, this revolution must also be accompanied by a reciprocal willing self-positioning as both student and teacher.