Novels of Renunciation

The Mill on the Floss may be the perfect novel. Not my favorite novel. Not the best novel. But the novel that does most classically and quintessentially that which novels -- of all forms of literature -- are best at doing. After all, other kinds of books - ones that aren't novels -- can tell you what to do. They can explain why and how. But novels are the most equipped to accompany you with sympathy when you discover how very little aid this purely preceptial morality is when faced with actual adult human life, with all its passions and incompatible values.

Modern readers who approach the book may not see the force of Maggie's (our protagonist's) various moral dilemmas. Worse, they may assume George Eliot a.k.a. Mary Anne Evans didn't really see the force of them either, and was simply a proto-modern who had to make insincere obeisances to the Victorian morality of her time in order to get into print (one of the typical moves whereby we moderns think we are "recovering" a Victorian, when in fact we are actually belittling their intellectual honesty). Many a modern will already be sold on all of the arguments against Maggie's "renunciations" before the other characters in the book have to make them.

Let us review them. Maggie believes at first that she can't be with the intellectual, painting, physically halt Philip -- even though by that description we all know already that she should be -- because he is the son of the man who helped to financially ruin her father. Therefore her brother and father won't hear of any such marriage, and she could not go against their wishes without, in her mind, hurting them.

But is it really "hurting" someone, in the morally sound sense, to offend against a conviction that is from the start an irrational prejudice -- in this case, one that would hold the sons guilty of the sins of the fathers, thus to punish the innocent along with the wicked? Modern readers would think not. Philip speaks for all of us, when he urges: "it is not right to sacrifice everything to other people's unreasonable feelings. I would give up a great deal for my father; but I would not give up a friendship or -- or an attachment of any sort, in obedience to any wish of his that I didn't recognize as right."

Okay, we might agree with that, then. But what good does it do anyone, when they actually face the loss of their family?

The decision not to marry Philip is, however, only the first of Maggie's two great renunciations. And the preceptial morality of modern readers is likely to have as little sympathy for the latter as the former. This second time, Maggie falls in love with her cousin Lucy's betrothed, the charming Stephen Guest, and he loves her right back. Eventually they are carried off accidentally in a boat together, and he begs her to marry him at the first place they land. She, after much internal consideration, says no.

In classic 19th-century novel fashion, no one has sex with anyone else. No one actually elopes and marries. But this unexpected boat trip is still enough to constitute a "fall."

Maggie's refusal of Stephen is done with the goal of protecting Lucy's feelings -- as well as those of Philip, whom she also refused to marry, but to whom she has plighted a chaste perpetual love. But in reality, her renunciation ends up hurting everyone far more than if she had simply married him. Stephen is heartbroken and can no longer think of marrying Lucy, who soon guesses what has happened. Philip understands as well that Maggie did not really love him, and was only betraying her true wish to marry Stephen out of a misguided desire to sacrifice herself.

Neither Lucy nor Philip, of course, is the least bit pleased or grateful for her sacrifice. Because what they want in each case is for Stephen and Maggie respectively to love them; and this was already stolen away, regardless of whether the other two married one another or not. The thing that people most want out of a relationship, then, can't actually be promised.

This the modern reader could have already told them. Stephen predicts it as well: "there are ties that can't be kept by mere resolution [...] What is outward faithfulness? Would [Lucy and Philip] have thanked us for anything so hollow as constancy without love?"

It is the burden of a great many novels of the post-Victorian age to drive home Stephen's point. The sort of sacrifice that Maggie makes serves no one. It can only cause resentment in the one for whom it is ostensibly made.

This is because renunciation is -- among other things --  a display of power. One can only meaningfully forego that which one has the privilege to choose to give up. To grant what one could have had to someone else, who couldn't otherwise have it, is to remind them of their relative helplessness and dependence. They are, quite literally, at one's mercy.

For this reason, in Gide's Strait is the Gate, Juliette refuses her older sister Alissa's attempt to make a total sacrifice on her behalf. Alissa knows that Juliette loves Jerome, our protagonist, and therefore she refuses to marry him, and eventually dies unwed. Juliette, however, grasping the nature of her sister's motives, refuses to accept Jerome under such conditions. She does not want to be married out of pity. She does not wish -- and who would? -- any husband of hers to view it as a sacrifice on his or anyone's part to marry her. It should be done out of love, out of desire.

In order to defy them both, therefore, and cheat them of their self-righteous altruism, Juliette marries an old vintner, bears him children, and lives an apparently prosperous and fulfilled existence (though in truth, and secretly, she insists -- along with the others -- on being miserable, nursing until the book's closing pages her own unquenched flame of love for the protagonist).

Alissa too at last confesses the selfish virtue that lay beneath her own act of self-abnegation; and she acknowledges that the moral victory ultimately belongs to her sister. It is Juliette who gains moral power in the end, for refusing the offer of the sacrifice, which would have condemned her to a life of grateful dependence upon her sister's free gift. "Yes," says Alissa, "I see that a horrible revival of egoism in me is offended at her having found her happiness elsewhere than in my sacrifice -- at her not having needed my sacrifice in order to be happy." (Bussy trans.)

This too is the lesson at last -- or one thereof -- of Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity. The narrator of that book debates throughout his tale whether he ought to marry the unwell daughter of his host, and thereby to sacrifice himself, out of affection and gratitude to their family. What he does not realize in his self-absorption, however -- until she confronts him with the reality of her feelings -- is that the daughter of course does not want him to make a sacrifice. She wants him to love her for her own sake and can be content with nothing less.

May Sinclair's Life and Death of Harriett Frean -- a wonderful, chilling, curt, 86-page pearl of a book -- has much the same old human lessons to relate. Harriett, our protagonist, is intellectually and spiritually ruined by her failure to develop an adult identity separate from that of her parents. In this she seems a kind of nightmare version of our author, or what she feared she might become (Sinclair -- perhaps most famous now for having coined the phrase "stream-of-consciousness," in a review of Dorothy Richardson -- never married and lived with her mother until the latter's death).

Harriett's Victorian morality leads her to commit a series of Maggie-esque sacrifices for the sake of her friends' feelings, which ultimately make all of them and herself infinitely more miserable than if she had just behaved selfishly from the start.

And one of the dark jokes of the novella is that her Victorian lack of self-awareness enables her to elude the truth of this for most of the book -- to reinterpret all of her own failings -- great and small -- as simply more evidence of her virtue (she can't manage to get all the way through Herbert Spencer -- she decides this is because he is an infidel and she must protect her faith; she takes to reading progressively sillier and simpler novels -- she concludes this is because simplicity and the avoidance of unnecessary negativity in the world are themselves literary virtues; etc.)

The sacrifice in Harriett's case is wholly parallel to those of Maggie and Alissa. When her helpless and clinging friend Priscilla becomes engaged, Harriett at first is happy for her, and is pleased to discover that she gets along well with her friend's fiancé, Robin. Soon, however, Harriett and Robin fall in love. She decides she must give him up, while cherishing inwardly the knowledge of their love, and so sets in motion the utter tragedy of the remainder of the novel.

Priscilla senses that her husband does not truly love her, leading her to conceive a neurotic, Munchausen-style "illness" for herself as a means -- however subconscious -- of ensnaring him emotionally. He is depleted by the experience to the point of becoming himself a petty and exacting tyrant in his second marriage, after Priscilla's death -- in effect taking out on his second wife what was done to him by the first.

As the husband's niece eventually puts it, speaking to Harriett: "You made three people miserable [...] Four if you count [the second wife]. [...] Look at the awful suffering, and you go on sentimentalizing about it."

The niece concludes that it is Harriett, above all, who behaved selfishly. In her ostensible effort to sacrifice herself, she in fact sacrificed all those around her on the altar of her own virtue. She was an idolator of righteousness. "She thought [only] of herself," concludes the niece, rounding out her curt indictment. "Of her own moral beauty. She was a selfish fool."

Much the same charge could be laid at Maggie's door. And Alissa's too.

It's all quite strange, since the Christian ethic of altruistic sacrifice and self-abnegation offers, at first blush, a clear standard at least by which to live one's life -- however exacting it may be. To return good for evil/ Not to fulfill your desires but to forget them, as Brecht summarizes. Seek not one's own good, but only another's. Give up all one has for someone else.

What all these novels tells us, however, is that seeking to live this way is a great deal more muddied in reality than it would appear. The ethic of self-sacrifice is a kind of infinite regress, ever-capable of still more involutions. The act of renunciation can itself be a means of reminding others of what you have the power to renounce -- say, the love of another -- and what they lack and most crave -- and therefore it becomes instead the opposite of renunciation -- it becomes an assertion of self-will and superiority.

So too, there might well be times when the higher sacrifice comes, not from maintaining the purity of one's own altruism, but from a willingness to do what you account to be wicked. This is the burden of Endo's novel Silence. This is also what Lars Von Trier's extraordinary 1996 film Breaking the Waves seems to be about. In it, our protagonist Bess decides to take guilt and even damnation -- in her eyes -- on herself, for the sake of her husband's life.

In George Eliot's novel, a clergyman in the latter section, Dr. Kenn, shows how such an ethic of self-sacrifice is ever capable of being given another turn of the screw.

Victorian social morality, first of all, would dictate that he should shun Maggie Tulliver, because she is a "fallen" woman, after her boating misadventure with Stephen. He, who knows his Gospel, however, his Good Samaritan and -- like Von Trier's Bess --  the example of Mary Magdalen and the Woman Taken in Adultery -- rightly concludes that society is wrong in this case. Spurning their pharisaical wisdom, he proceeds to spiritually counsel Maggie.

But then, rumors start to fly that he has designs on the young woman himself, and might decide to marry her. Even though these allegations are false, he concludes, he is harming the dignity of his office and betraying his clerical duties by continuing to see her. And the very fact that renouncing their association strikes him as the more cowardly, craven, and iniquitous path, suddenly now makes it seem that it may perhaps be the more virtuous one.

Writes Eliot: "Dr. Kenn [...] was still averse to give way before a public sentiment that was odious and contemptible; but he was finally wrought upon by the consideration of the peculiar responsibility attached to his office [...] perhaps it was his duty to succumb: conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course; and to recede was always painful to Dr. Kenn."

The modern reader, of course, will find all of this thumb-screwing ridiculous. They will agree with the niece, and Stephen, and all the other sensible people in these novels that a small amount of healthy self-centeredness on everyone's part -- a willingness finally to err on the side of one's own happiness -- ultimately works more for the good of all than any throwing of oneself on the funeral pyre.

This, however, is no real escape from the dialectic. It is simply an effort to posit as final one rotation of the eternal moral conversation. It relies on the same moral assumptions as the ethic of self-sacrifice. It is simply declaring that in some cases, the willingness to sacrifice is itself more selfish, and the unselfish choice is to be selfish. Philip, for instance, in The Mill on the Floss, argues against Maggie's ethic of self-sacrifice by saying that in reality, it is a means of protecting herself from pain. By giving up the quest for what she desires, she is insulating herself from the possibility of loss. George Orwell makes much the same critique of the saintly ethic in his essays on Tolstoy and Gandhi. In both cases, they are using a standard of self-sacrifice to critique self-sacrifice.

You see, then, that the modern critic of Victorian morality cannot escape from the infinite regress of the Christian ethic and more than their opponents. They are simply making another attempt to live by precept -- one as misguided in its way as the path of one who thinks that simply to say "Do good unto others, rather than oneself" is a final and uncomplicated answer.

What all the above novels tell us -- and The Mill on the Floss most of all -- is that neither the Victorian nor the modern will have the final say. Neither is "right." As George Eliot concludes: "[M]oral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot. [... T]he mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and [...] to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy."

This is the good that novels can do-- the purpose that practically no other form of literature can serve so well. The novel, in its ideal form, is essentially a narration of those "special circumstances that mark the individual lot." It captures a single and unrepeatable experience that will never, in human life, occur in exactly the same way again. But for precisely this reason, it is one of the only forms of literature that can provide any moral guidance for the circumstances that occur without it.

If this seems paradoxical, it is no more a paradox than that of morality itself, as we have outlined above. And life, the more one looks at it, seems made up for the most part -- or at least, in all its most important respects --  of paradoxes. We live in the midst of a series of infinities. Like all infinities, they are inconceivable, and therefore by all rights ought to be impermissible as thoughts. Yet we are inevitably thrust back upon them. And we stumble toward them as best we can. Never reaching them, because we can't. But moving -- one hopes -- in what seems to be their direction.