The Victorian Novel of Adulthood. Rebecca Rainof

as stasis can be identified as part of a larger scholarly trend that flirts with branding Eliot a “conservative,” thereby refusing to accept Eliot’s vision of gradual progress as true progress at all.⁶ As a counter-reading to such scholarship, this chapter explores Eliot’s insistent fascination with extreme gradualism and how it is linked to her most unconventional approaches to plotting stories for her mature protagonists. In these works, which include Scenes of Clerical Life, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, Romola, and Daniel Deronda, Eliot resists the pull of the marriage plot to give failed first endeavors less attention in a larger story of second chances.⁷ This period of adulthood attained becomes the subject of Eliot’s most radical writing, for in depicting maturity at length and, in some cases, as a “humdrum” conclusion protested by readers, Eliot launches an embedded critique of the marriage plot and the bildungsroman as the main plots available in Victorian fiction.

      I. Adventures for “Grown-Up People”

      This approach to plotting the “humdrum” would seem to be completely at odds with the vim of the adventure story. Adventures are for young people, at least if one believes Georg Simmel, whose definition has shaped numerous studies of the bildungsroman and its tumultuous plots. As Simmel writes,

      The adventure does not belong to the life-style of old age. The decisive point about this fact is that the adventure, in its specific nature and charm, is a form of experiencing. . . . The old person usually lives either in a wholly centralized fashion, peripheral interests having fallen off and being unconnected with his essential life and its inner necessity; or his center atrophies, and existence runs its course only in isolated petty details, accenting mere externals and accidentals. Neither case makes possible the relation between the outer fate and the inner springs of life in which the adventure consists; clearly, neither permits the perception of contrast characteristic of adventure, viz., that an action is completely torn out of the inclusive context of life and that simultaneously the whole strength and intensity of life stream into it.”⁸